Ok so after seeing this on the forum a few times and having run into the problem myself throughout development I finally took the time to figure out what is going on.
There are a series of “.a” files that should be in:
cocos2dx/platform/third_party/android/libraries/
The files are:
libcurl.a
libjpeg.a
libpng.a
libxml2.a
The issue seems to be that SVN (not sure about Git) simply does not see these files so they are never committed to the project. The simple solution is to just unzip a new copy of coco2d-x and grab the files and drop them in the right spot in your local copy.
I hope I was able to alleviate some frustration.
If anyone knows how to get SVN to see these files that would be very welcome!