Most Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine, but Google has released the tools developers need to create native apps.

The company warns that native apps have advantages and disadvantages. They will be more complicated, have reduced compatibility, have no access to framework APIs, and be harder to debug. On the other hand, some applications that have self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don’t allocate much memory may still benefit from increased performance and the ability to reuse existing code. Some examples are signal processing, intensive physics simulations, and some kinds of data processing.

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