Upgrade NDK to 28 to avoid memory pagination issues

[david-metrica]

Starting with Android 15 (API 35), devices can use 16KB memory page sizes instead of the traditional 4KB.

From Nov 1, 2025, any new apps or updates targeting Android 15+ will need to support 16KB pages.

By May 1, 2026, updates to existing apps that don’t support this will be blocked from publishing.

The web-audio-api-rs crate currently uses an older version of the NDK, which defaults to 4 KB page sizes.

With Android's transition to 16 KB page sizes, applications using this crate may encounter compatibility issues on newer devices

Updating the crate to support NDK r28 or higher will ensure proper alignment with 16 KB page sizes, preventing potential crashes and performance degradation.

I’m not sure whether we need to wait for dependent libraries, such as ndk-sys, to be updated.

[orottier]

Thanks for the report. What dependency of this crate do you mean? This sounds like a transitive dependency of cpal maybe?

[david-metrica]

It does seem like it could be coming through cpal. In particular, the Android-related dependencies look like this:

ndk = { version = "0.9", default-features = false, features = [
    "audio",
    "api-level-26",
] }
ndk-context = "0.1"

I noticed this while building node-web-audio-api, but it shouldn’t be directly related to it— I haven’t tried building web-audio-api-rs itself.

[orottier]

Alright, good to know. Your issue should probably be addressed to cpal then. Assuming api-level-26 refers to the NDK?
I do notice we lag one version behind on cpal, I can put out a release later this week to move to 0.16 and ask for a npm release as well. But I doubt this will fix the issue.

[david-metrica]

I might be wrong about this but I think api-level is unrelated to the NDK.
You can set any api level supported by the NDK.
NDK is probably pulling ndk-sys and this one is bound to a NDK version.
For example ndk-sys 0.5.0 is bound to NDK 25:

• https://crates.io/crates/ndk-sys/0.5.0+25.2.9519653

[MarijnS95]

The ndk-sys crate is not responsible for this, see rust-mobile/ndk#506 (comment).

It depends on the tooling/NDK that was used to cross-compile your crate for Android and package it into an APK, like cargo-apk.