Android and Native C/C++ Libraries

They’re everywhere.

The 100 most popular applications for the Android platform (as of December 2018) have been installed 54+ billion times.

I downloaded each of the most popular app’s APK file and unzipped them to count the number of compiled native C/C++ libraries that each app contained.

#!/bin/bash
apk=1
for app in *.apk; do    
    app=$(basename -- "$app")
    extension="${app##*.}"
    appPackage="${app%.*}"
    mkdir -p ${appPackage}
    cd ${appPackage}
 
    unzip ${appPackage}
    numberOfNativeLibs=$(find . -type f -name "*.so" | wc -l)
  
    cd ..
    apk=$(($apk+1)) 
    
    echo "$ranking $appPackage $numberOfNativeLibs"
done | column -t

85% of the one hundred most popular apps contain native code with 1038 individual shared objects (.so files).

Instagram contained a total 141 native libraries!

Top 100 Apps and Number of Native Libraries