Benchmarking Java application using JNI and native C application on Android

Android is one of the most widely spread mobile platform. Many people are using Android mobile devices and many developers are creating Android applications at this moment. When developing applications, the differences in performance between Java and C/C++ are a well-known issue. Because this is also true in Android, many Android application developers prefer to use the Android NDK along with Java compared to using only Java language. However, there are certain performance gaps in not only using different programming languages but also in using glibc of a native cross-compiler and bionic libc of the Android NDK. In this paper, we show the difference in performance between Android applications compiled by using a native cross-compiler for ARM and a native shared library through the JNI of the Android NDK. We used Mibench, a representative embedded benchmark suite that can be used freely with no restrictions. As a result, it was found that using the native shared library through the JNI of the Android NDK is faster compared to using the native cross-compiler for ARM in five of six cases.