Originally we used CodeWarrior internally and then Carbide. Most of the Carbide work was done in Dallas and I remember them having a stressful time dealing with Symbian's weird MMP + abld build system.

Yeah, I know also those nice Perl based scripts with batch files glue somehow being called from CodeWarrior, just referred Carbide, because at the end the experience wasn't that bad, specially by the Belle days.

Google just doesn't get it, note that major GDC 2020 Android talks are mostly related to NDK improvements, 10 years later.

Although the NDK is really annoying, it's not required to build an app, which it seems like Symbian C++ was. I think that's critical for getting the app ecosystem off the ground.

You could use Java, Flash, Python and Web Runtime as alternatives back then. Much richer than Android still.

Thanks for the clarification :) It was before my time.

Android studio and jni dev is pretty trivial TBH. It even builds the boilerplate for you

Try to generate boilerplate code for calling permissions API from C++.

NDK is designed for Java => NDK libraries only.

Well I'm generally only writing interfaces for native code I've written.