installing libiio library for android

Moving to Linux forum for comments on libiio.

I know this was done before. Our Android expert is currently out of office, but he'll get back to you next week.

-Michael

Hello,

We've compiled libiio for Android in the Scopy project. However, Scopy is a C++/Qt library which is compiled using the Android NDK. The first step in supporting libiio in your Android Java/Kotlin application is to build the library using an NDK supported by your Android version.

In this repo https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/gnuradio-android/tree/android-maint-3.10 there are recipes to build libiio and it's dependencies for Android. Once you have a library built for Android, you can use it in applications that are compiled with the NDK (such as Scopy - this is where we stopped).

The following is speculation based on my experience with Scopy:

As far as I know it is no possible to use the library directly from Android Runtime (Java/Kotlin). 

Bindings need to be created from C to Java space. My guess is that this is done by creating another "binding" library that links to libiio and JNI (Java default Interface). You can expose your own methods(that implement libiio calls) from C to the Java environment by adhering to some coding conventions. An example of this in action is also available in Scopy here:

https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/scopy/blob/main/src/tool_launcher.hpp#L207-L215 

https://github.com/analogdevicesinc/scopy/blob/main/src/tool_launcher.cpp#L2133-L2231 

Once you get the binding library, which uses Java Compatible Classes (as opposed to libiio C structs), it can be imported and used in Android Studio. 

This talk summarizes my experience with building gnuradio (which involves building libiio) for Android.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TilONOVSArw&pp=ygUQZ251cmFkaW8gYW5kcm9pZA%3D%3D 

-Adrian

EDIT: Also moved to Virtual Classroom forum

did you actually get it working? i would love to use pluto family sdr on android. 

android already has sdrangel and sdr++ but neither works without libiio

Yes, It's documented at the links above.

-Adrian