Less than a month after the release of the Android 4.0 SDK, Google has updated its native development kit with bugfixes and support for two new media-centric Ice Cream Sandwich APIs. The NDK allows developers to use native code in Android apps; while Android software runs within a virtual machine, in certain tasks there are performance or implementation benefits to be had in running native C or C++ over Java. The additions in revision 7 are aimed squarely at audio and video, providing native handling of low-level multimedia streaming — perfect for apps that need to apply proprietary encryption or decryption to media — as well as native decoding of compressed audio files into the PCM format. Google has consistently cautioned that using native code will not benefit most applications, but if you'd like to take the new APIs for a spin, the updated NDK is available now.