Android

Android gets a Kotlin and JNI plugin over the same renderer core. Gradle runs the setup before the native build, so on Linux there’s nothing to run by hand. On a Mac there’s one step first.

Which machine

Your machine
Mac, Apple silicon	Yes, after the Mac setup
Linux, x86_64	Yes
Linux, arm64	No. The setup fetches an x86_64 matc, which won’t run there
Windows	No. The setup has no matc for a Windows machine, and stops with no matc for host

The reason is the same as everywhere else: Filament’s matc has to run on the machine doing the build. The Android release doesn’t carry one, so the setup borrows the Mac’s, or on Linux fetches Google’s x86_64 Linux release just for its matc.

What you need

Android Studio, or its command line tools	With the SDK for Android 16 (API 36)
NDK 28.2.13676358	The version the plugin pins, which is also Flutter 3.47’s default
CMake 3.22.1	The Android SDK’s own copy
JDK 17 or newer	The plugin compiles for Java 17, and CI builds with Temurin 17. Flutter uses Android Studio’s bundled JDK by default, which is newer
xxd	Turns compiled materials into C arrays. macOS has it. On Debian or Ubuntu, sudo apt-get install xxd

Your app can target Android 7.0 (API 24) and up, which is Flutter’s own floor, so a new project needs no change.

The NDK and CMake come from the SDK Manager, in Android Studio or on the command line:

yes | "$ANDROID_HOME/cmdline-tools/latest/bin/sdkmanager" --install "ndk;28.2.13676358" "cmake;3.22.1"
flutter doctor --android-licenses

ANDROID_HOME is wherever your SDK lives. Android Studio puts it in ~/Library/Android/sdk on a Mac and ~/Android/Sdk on Linux.

On a Mac, run the Mac setup first

On a Mac, the Android setup takes its matc from the Mac setup’s download rather than fetching another. So run the loop from macOS and iOS first, even if you’re only building for Android. Without it, the build stops with a message that ends run ../darwin/setup.sh first.

Running it

The plugin is built for arm64-v8a only, so it runs on a phone, or on an emulator with an arm64 system image. An Apple silicon Mac’s emulator is arm64, so it runs there.

flutter devices
flutter run -d <id>

The build CI runs is:

flutter build apk --debug --target-platform=android-arm64

The first build downloads Filament’s Android release, 58 MB. On Linux it downloads the Linux release too, 52 MB, for its matc. It compiles the materials for Vulkan and OpenGL ES.

No x86_64 emulator

An Intel or AMD machine runs x86_64 emulator images, and the plugin has no x86_64 library for them to load. Android’s own ARM translation might cover the gap, but nobody has tried, so on a Linux PC, plan on a phone.

What to expect

Vulkan is the default, and reaches feature level 3, so Android gets the standard lit surface rather than the slimmer one the iOS simulator gets.

It has drawn on a Galaxy S24+ running Android 16, on Vulkan at feature level 3, with the engine up in 79 milliseconds. It has also drawn on the emulator, through SwiftShader, which is a software renderer, so the emulator’s timings say nothing about a phone. CI builds the APK on every change but doesn’t run it, so the on-device check is still done by hand.