I have found that the Android’s NDK folder is entirely missing on MacOS from Unity/Hub. It’s simply not there. I had to solve this.
Here’s the context.
When I installed 2021 LTS it seemed to linger forever at the end, unable to conclude the installation despite looking like it had finished. I had selected the necessary Android and iOS modules ahead of the process. No message was given to check if the download was properly finished. I just had to assume it was after hours of just nothing happening (I let the computer do its thing while attending to other affairs). I can’t remember what it did next but it finally looked like it was all completed.
When I tried to create a new Android project, I was flooded with prompts to update precompiled assemblies for a bunch of extensions downloaded from the Package Manager, all of this because of API-tis and because of totally fresh and up to date extensions somehow relying on old code. Baffling.
Then Android Resolver kicked in and failed at 1s. Gradle and Android Resolver issues are at the top of my list of most hated issues with Unity, easily. I went into ‘Preferences > External Tools’, unchecked all boxes and the paths were all pointing at a much older version of Unity. Amazing! Even better, the path to the NDK was blank. I went there and there was no NDK folder at all. So, yes, the Hub had indeed failed to install the NDK but pretended all was fine.
Without being able to do anything from Unity as far as I know to solve this, I fell back onto the Hub and hoped to be able to manage this from inside this tool.
The Hub says both SDK and NDK tools are available. Amuse me. The Hub doesn’t provide an option to uncheck any of these, and re-download them. Unlike, say, in Android Studio. I thought that it might be somewhere in ‘Add modules’ for example since it appeared to be the only place where anything like a view of the hierarchy existed. Unfortunately, no. So I had to hope this most basic level of control was hidden elsewhere. Like in ‘Uninstall’.
So I clicked there, expecting at the very least a prompt about what I was about to do. I was honestly wondering if a menu would appear to allow me to unselect and uninstall some components, but there was not a single verification prompt displayed, not even something like “Are you certain you want to uninstall Unity xxxx?”. Just nothing. Instead, the Hub immediately proceeded to erase the whole editor!
This mediocrity is just unbelievable. This is not even a bug, this is bad design.