Do the most basic Android Plugins for Unity need the NDK installed

Unity Engine
1

Hi folks, I am a little confused as to what the NDK actually is.

Basically I’ve been trying to make a plugin which will request permissions like READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE at runtime for my android games.

I’ve followed many tutorials and have a fairly good idea how to write and structure the plugin. I believe that I have one finished now (although sadly it instantly crashes when I try play it on my phone , so today I am re-writing a simpler version to try get that to load ok)

But before I started re-writing from scratch, I started reading this: Unity - Manual: Building Plugins for Android
It says I must have the NDK installed. (nb. I dont think im using any C++ at all in my plugin is just Java)

Also, yesterday I had problems building my game, once I put my first attempt at the plugin into it. And I had tried then to install NDK and uninstalling it. But neither worked. However when my second attempt at the plugin did Build from Unity, but as I say it crashes instantly (pretty sure I know what I did wrong there, I made a MainActivity and i think that is whats messing it up)

But before i start. I just wanted to check if the NDK is ALWAYS needed for these plugins, even if I didnt write any C++ code myself? Thanks

2

OK I finally found the answer, and I thought I’d leave a little record for anyone else who might have similar problem.

It was nothing to do with the NDK, I have removed it now as I never used it as far as i know.

The solution was strange (and I am fairly sure there are better ways if you know what you’re doing) but I had to open the .AAR file inside WinRAR and delete the classes.jar situated in /libs/ folder. Then i just drag the AAR into Unity and do exactly what I was doing and it works