WebGPU on Android

Two WebGPU implementations are supported: Dawn (Google, C++) and wgpu-native (Rust). Both use Vulkan internally on Android. The Gradle product flavors are webgpuDawn and webgpuWgpu, sharing the src/webgpu/ Java source set.

Building with Dawn

Dawn is fetched and built from source via CMake FetchContent, so no extra setup is needed. First build is slow (~20 min) because of Dawn’s dependencies (abseil, SPIRV-Tools, Tint, etc.).

Android Studio: Open the Build Variants panel (View > Tool Windows > Build Variants) and select webgpuDawnDebug for both :MapLibreAndroid and :MapLibreAndroidTestApp, then run normally.

Terminal:

cd platform/android
./gradlew :MapLibreAndroidTestApp:installWebgpuDawnDebug

Building with wgpu-native

wgpu-native requires a pre-built static library for the target ABI. The webgpuWgpu flavor is currently limited to arm64-v8a.

1. Cross-compile wgpu-native for Android

Install the Rust Android target:

rustup target add aarch64-linux-android

Point cargo at the NDK linker. Create or edit ~/.cargo/config.toml:

[target.aarch64-linux-android]
linker = "<NDK_PATH>/toolchains/llvm/prebuilt/<host>/bin/aarch64-linux-android26-clang"

Replace <NDK_PATH> with the path to your Android NDK and <host> with your platform (e.g. darwin-x86_64 on macOS).

Then build:

cd vendor/wgpu-native
cargo build --release --target aarch64-linux-android

This produces vendor/wgpu-native/target/aarch64-linux-android/release/libwgpu_native.a, which the CMake build picks up automatically.

2. Build and install

Android Studio: Select webgpuWgpuDebug in the Build Variants panel and run.

Terminal:

cd platform/android
./gradlew :MapLibreAndroidTestApp:installWebgpuWgpuDebug

Debugging wgpu-native

wgpu-native logs are routed to Android logcat under the wgpu-native tag (warnings and errors by default). Rust panic messages appear under wgpu-native-stderr. Filter with:

adb logcat -s wgpu-native:W wgpu-native-stderr:E

To increase verbosity, change WGPULogLevel_Warn to WGPULogLevel_Info (or Debug / Trace) in android_webgpu_renderer_backend.cpp.

Notes

The native backend is in MapLibreAndroid/src/cpp/android_webgpu_renderer_backend.cpp. It uses #if MLN_WEBGPU_IMPL_DAWN / #elif MLN_WEBGPU_IMPL_WGPU for the API differences, same pattern as the desktop backends.

wgpu-native’s adapter request forces backendType = Vulkan — without this it may pick GL on some emulators, which can’t present to an ANativeWindow surface.