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NDK Release Process
Beginning with NDK r21, the NDK maintains both a frequent, "rolling" release that happens on a roughly quarterly basis and a Long Term Support (LTS) release that releases once a year (typically in Q3). For more information on each release, see the LTS Release and Rolling Release sections below.
Each NDK releases will first release to beta and betas will continue to be released until the bar for promotion has been met, at which time we will ship it as a release candidate. Release candidates will also be re-spun as needed until the bar for release to stable has been met. Betas can be turned around as quickly as we are able. The first RC will be given at least a month of soak time to gather feedback. Soak time for subsequent RCs depends on the risk of the fixes in each RC, but will be at least two weeks.
The bar for promotion between release channels depends on the release type. See the LTS release criteria and Rolling release criteria sections below for more information.
The end of the support window is the last day that we will ship an update. A severe bug filed on the last day of the support window will not be fixed in the release it was filed against.
Some types of bugs (toolchain bugs in particular) can take months to fix. The release process itself can take a long time as well, depending on QA availability. In practice, bugs filed in the last month (for toolchain bugs, the last two months) of a release window may not be able to be fixed until the next release.
These triage guidelines describe what bugs gate each release and what will be considered for backports. Note that these are not strict rules. A difficult or risky fix for a medium severity issue may not receive a backport, and a trivial backport for a low severity issue might.
Note that features (with the exception of updating the sysroot for new Android APIs in the LTS) will never be added in point releases.
- Toolchain crashes or miscompiles with no workaround.
- Security vulnerabilities (either in the NDK itself or in generated code).
- Regression in compatibility with important third-party libraries (OpenSSL, cURL, etc).
- Severe performance regressions in generated code.
- Toolchain crashes or miscompiles with a workaround.
- Source compatibility issues.
- Non-contrived, non-severe performance regressions.
- Workarounds for platform bugs.
- All other bugs.
- Toolchain driver issues. Any flags needed to make Android compiles work beyond
-targetfit into this category.- Note that these are not currently blocking, as we have not reached this state yet. Once clean, regressions will be considered blockers.
- Bugs in experimental portions of the toolchain, such as compiler crashes that only occur when using an unfinished C++ standard version. No guarantees are made about the stability or availability of these features, and providing a fix risks destabilizing the rest of the toolchain.
Wherever possible we will follow the guidelines laid out in this document, but for cases where LLVM does not yet have a fix we may not have the resources to fix it ourselves. Fixes of this nature often must be made by a subject matter expert, and most of those engineers are not on our staff. LLVM is a team effort including many companies and individuals, and their schedules are not dictated by the NDK.
For these cases, we will raise the issue with the LLVM community and see that it reaches the right people. We do not wish to indefinitely delay an NDK release, so if a fix is not forthcoming we will need to ship with those known issues. Regressions from the previous release will be given more weight so as to not impede taking NDK updates, but the same constraints apply.
These releases cater to users that prioritize stability over new features.
Support for LTS NDKs ends after a minimum of one year, or when the next LTS reaches the release candidate stage.
One release a year will be designated as the Long Term Support release. These have a higher bar for stability. This means that we will spend more time fixing bugs before promoting to the next stage of the release, and also that lower severity bugs will trigger a point release than would for a rolling release.
The only features that will be backported to the LTS release are sysroot updates for new Android APIs introduced in the year's OS update.
The following table describes the release criteria for LTS releases. A respin means that we've already released one release of that type and must release another to meet our stability goals. We will not ship any type of release until we have met this bar, but will respin as needed when bugs are reported against the release.
For example, after we release beta 1 for an LTS release, any high or medium severity bug, as well as any low severity regression will result in beta 2 being released before we proceed to RC 1. Once RC 1 is released, any medium or high severity bug will result in another RC being released before we proceed to stable. NB: This means that once we've entered the RC phase, fewer bugs will be considered for respin. File your bugs as early as possible if you want them fixed.
Once we've released to stable, any newly filed medium or high severity bug will result in a point release. Once begun, a point release may receive fixes for low severity bugs on a case-by-case basis.
| Beta respin triggered by | Low severity regressions |
| RC respin triggered by | Medium severity |
| Point release triggered by | Medium severity |
| Point release accepts | Low severity |
Support for each rolling NDK release ends when the next NDK release (rolling or LTS) reaches the release candidate phase. This typically will not be more frequent than once a quarter.
The following table describes the release criteria for rolling releases. For a description of how to interpret this table, see the description accompanying the LTS release criteria.
| Beta respin triggered by | Medium severity |
| RC respin triggered by | High severity |
| Point release triggered by | High severity |
| Point release accepts | Medium severity |