I built my own game engine from the ground up for this project and the hardest problem I have had to solve this entire project remains "how do you build anything at all for Android"
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It's occasionally just really shocking that Google still hasn't faced just how bad the developer experience targeting the NDK is. Apple is actively hostile to third party devs yet they were not able to create something as hostile as the Android build system(s) became by accident
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I think they just don't want the NDK to exist if possible, code with pointers isn't for you to write.
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This to me says "they don't want cross platform software" and who on earth is going to write Android-exclusive software
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Also as an interesting piece of trivia, I am actually targeting a non-phone hardware platform which chose to use Android as its base but which does not run conventional Android apps and does not, in fact, appear to support Java at all
But still uses the Android/Java build system
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The funny part about it is that Android SDK/NDK build system isn't what's used by Android itself. Android itself is busy replacing a far superior build system to the one they make app developers use with a better one, after previously going through a past replacement like that.
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gradle isn't the kind of thing they'd build though. They just made a plugin for it. The Android build system itself may not be as wonderful as Bazel would have been but it's actually the nicest build system that I've used overall. gradle could actually be the worst.
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It seems like the SDK people were given the constraint that they had to use an existing public build system used by a lot of Java developers already, so they used ant and then moved to gradle.
Yeah, it's some horrifying thing from the Java ecosystem that basically seems to have been made with the goal of being way faster than Maven (which is horrible) at the expense of being way more complex and confusing.
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