Yeah, that's exactly what I was getting at. They don't seem to take the NDK seriously. It's very weird.

It is not weird if you think they would rather not have it at all.

It wasn't there until 2.2, only got added due to community pressure and they always did the minimum amount of work.

When the migration to Android Studio was announced, we got left with no migration plan.

Only after JET Brains announced CLion, almost 2 years later, did they announce the migration to Studio.

Likewise they moved into Gradle without plan for C NDK support and it took three generations of build tools until they decided to settle on CMake.

Yes! But why?

As an earlier commenter mentioned, games are one of the biggest app categories and many games rely on the NDK. Pro audio could be another big category, but I think Apple has the market sewn up there because Android is still way behind.

I guess, because a few key figures come from Sun's Java team and WebOS, with politics having a big role.

Same thing seems to be the case with their messaging team. I don't know how many they are, but even before they spread themselves thin by releasing Allo and Duo they lagged behind the competition and released rarely and with few differences when they did. I have no idea what Google uses their engineers for, it doesn't seem to be Android related anyway. I think Reader went away because they didn't have anyone to maintain it.

There were plenty of people inside Google who would have liked to maintain Reader, but management explicitly made the decision to shut it down.

(I'm not saying that there's anything inherently unreasonable about that, although I happen to disagree with the decision. But these things cost money and they decided they didn't want to spend the money.)