Debug 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.
You can debug crashes in Android Studio as described in the general
Debug your app documentation. If you prefer to use the
command-line, ndk-gdb lets you attach either gdb
or
lldb
from your shell.
Debug native memory issues
Address Sanitizer (HWASan/ASan)
HWAddress Sanitizer (HWASan) and Address Sanitizer (ASan) are similar to Valgrind, but significantly faster and much better supported on Android.
These are your best option for debugging memory errors on Android.
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.
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.