RFC: Android / ART Support for LadybugDB as an Embedded Graph Database

[Subham-chaudhary]

It's great to see LadybugDB positioning itself as a modern embedded graph database with support across major desktop and server platforms (ARM/x86 on Windows and Linux), while also providing bindings for multiple languages.

I was wondering whether Android support is on the roadmap.

From an architectural perspective, Ladybug already seems like a strong fit for mobile-Android particularly.

Motivation

Android currently lacks a modern, lightweight, open-source embedded graph database designed for native mobile applications.

As on-device AI continues to improve, an embedded graph database can become a key component for applications that use local LLMs, tool calling, and GraphRAG.
This enables a wide range of applications while keeping user data entirely on-device, providing

• better privacy,
• offline capability, and
• low-latency access
• and that too without requiring cloud services or subscriptions.

and ot seems ladybugdb would be best candidate for this.

Ideally, Android support would include

1. Cross-compilation for Android, starting with ARM64 and potentially expanding to ARMv7 and x86/x86_64.
2. Android NDK-compatible native libraries.
3. Prebuilt binaries published to Maven Central (or another Maven-compatible repository) so they can be easily integrated into Android projects using Gradle, Maven, or other JVM build tools.
4. Documentation or examples demonstrating integration with Android applications.

Question

Is Android/ART support something that's planned for the future?

If Android/ART support isn't currently planned, I'd be interested in investigating an Android port.
Given that the Java bindings already communicate with the native C++ engine via JNI,

it seems plausible that Android support could be achieved by extending the native build system to target Android NDK toolchains, generating ABI-specific shared libraries (arm64v8a initially), and packaging them for Gradle/Maven consumption.

does the engine depend on Linux-specific libraries, syscalls, or other platform assumptions that are unavailable or different on Android?

[adsharma]

Anything missing here? LadybugDB/ladybug-java#8

[adsharma]

Even though we test compatibility with android, we don't publish any android specific binaries to maven. That's the missing piece. Kuzu had support for this and I don't think we did anything to break it.

What's missing is the devops work to reenable the CI for android to publish binaries on release.

My thinking is to keep all that code in ladybug-java repo instead of stretching the CI in the monorepo to do more and more. This is the same path swift-ladybug is taking.