Debugging native crashes
If you're struggling to understand a native crash dump or tombstone, Debugging Native Android Platform Code is a good introduction.
For a fuller catalog of common types of crash and how to investigate them, see Diagnosing Native Crashes.
The ndk-stack tool can help symbolize your crashes,
and ndk-gdb lets you attach gdb from the command-line,
though you're probably better off using Android Studio's built-in lldb support
described in their general Debug your app documentation.
Debugging native memory issues
Malloc debug
See Malloc Debug and Native Memory Tracking using libc Callbacks for a thorough description of the C library's built-in options for debugging native memory issues.
Address Sanitizer (ASan)
Since Android 8.0 (Oreo) it's also possible to use ASan to debug apps on non-rooted production devices. This is similar to Valgrind, but significantly faster and much better supported. You can find detailed instructions on the ASan wiki.
Malloc hooks
If you want to build your own tools, Android's libc also supports intercepting all allocation/free calls that happen during program execution. See the malloc_hooks documentation for usage instructions.
Malloc statistics
Android supports the
mallinfo(3)
and
malloc_info(3)
extensions to <malloc.h>.
The malloc_info functionality is available in Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) and
higher and its XML schema is documented in Bionic's
malloc.h
header.
Profiling
For CPU profiling of native code, you can use Simpleperf.