// the take
A packaged, prebuilt libcurl (with BoringSSL, nghttp2, and a full HTTP/3 stack via ngtcp2/nghttp3) distributed as a Gradle Prefab dependency for Android native projects. It's for Android/NDK developers who need curl inside a C/C++ app and don't want to hand-roll the cross-compilation of curl plus its TLS and QUIC dependencies.
Saves a genuinely painful build: cross-compiling curl + BoringSSL + nghttp2 + nghttp3 + ngtcp2 for multiple Android ABIs is not trivial, and this does it as a one-line Gradle dependency via Prefab. Includes a real HTTP/3 (QUIC) stack, which most curl-on-Android setups skip entirely. Defaults to the system CA store and system DNS rather than bundling a cacert.pem that goes stale, which is the more correct choice for a mobile TLS client. Release cadence tracks upstream curl closely (8.0 through 8.18 over roughly three years), and the maintainer has gotten at least two patches merged upstream into curl itself rather than carrying permanent forks.
Single maintainer with no visible co-maintainers or CONTRIBUTING process — if they stop, consumers are stuck pinned to whatever version shipped last, with a C codebase and submodule pins to patch themselves. No test suite or CI evidence that the cross-compiled binaries actually pass curl's own test suite on-device; you're trusting the build produced a correct result, not just that it compiled. The LTO build variant is documented as ~40MiB and explicitly not stripped of debug info, which is easy to ship by accident into a release APK and bloat it. Integration is Prefab/Gradle-only — there's no path for raw NDK builds, Bazel, or non-Gradle toolchains, despite the ndk-build/CMake snippets implying otherwise.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →