Android have released version 3 of its Native Development Kit (NDK), which assists developers to produce games and applications.

The big news with the latest NDK release it that it enables support for OpenGL ES 2.0 features. This means that phones powered on the Android platform will be able to rival the visual quality of iPhone games, which have long supported OpenGL Es 2.0.

Basically , OpenGL ES 2.0 support adds support for vertex and fragment shader programs using the GLSL shading language, which although double-dutch to us, no doubt means a lot to developers and to the quality of graphics capable on the Android platform.

It remains to be seen whether the Android platform can rival the iPhone as a games machine, but it’ll be interesting to see how this develops.