Generally building with the NDK is as simple as correctly specifying an ndkBuild path to Android.mk or cmake path to CMakeLists.txt. This NDK feature has been 'coming soon' for almost 3+ years. Gradle for Android has been a mess in my opinion, much as I like the maven concepts borrowed and the opinionated structure of directories for a project. And these instructions are kind to Windows users, who should theoretically be able to build on windows without special issues. You control which targets arch(s) to build.

Use the above approach to ensure that your hours and hours of effort creating Android.mk files won't be tossed away.

Make sure gradle.properties has: eDeprecatedNdk=true (in case it's complaining).

Use :gradle:1.5.0 in your Project root.

Don't upgrade your project to the latest gradle build.

In a nutshell, I recommend the following:

I've posted my approach, borrowed from somewhere (I found this on SO, but posted a gist for the app adle: ). We all would like to be using Android studio now most likely, or want a more CI friendly build toolchain for mobile, which gradle theoretically offers. While I believe SJoshi (oracle guy) has the most complete answer, the SWIG project is a special case, interesting and useful one, at that, but not generalized for the majority of projects that have done well with the standard SDK ant based projects + NDK.

Gradle android studio description