Google recently released a native development kit for those looking to build applications for smartphones that run on its Android platform. This news gives developers some added flexibility in how their software runs on these devices.

You see, today, Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The new Android Native Development Kit allows developers to implement parts of these apps using native-code languages such as C and C++, which has certain benefits to some kinds of applications, but not all.

Here's what Google has to say on its Android Developers blog:

Keep in mind that using the NDK will not be relevant for all Android applications. As a developer, you will need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks, which are numerous! Your application will be more complicated, have reduced compatibility, have no access to framework APIs, and be harder to debug. That said, 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.

You can now download the Android Native Development Kit from the Android developer site here.