This paper is written for readers who are interested in smart handheld devices and with little or no background in toolchains. We give a general introduction to toolchains for smart mobile devices, using Google’s mobile C/C++ toolchain as examples when appropriate. We discuss a number of topics, but not in great detail. Instead, we want this gentle introduction to spark readers’ interests and to inspire them to explore on their own, using this paper as a starting point. Compiler optimizations for Android has been discussed previously in but we cover more than one Google platform. We also give updates on some topics discussed in .