I’ve tried the solution presented in the accepted answer and it did not work for me.
I wanted to share what DID work for me as it might help someone else. I’ve found this solution here.
Basically what you need to do is put your .so files inside a a folder named lib (Note: it is not libs and this is not a mistake). It should be in the same structure it should be in the APK file.
In my case it was:
Project:
|–lib:
|–|–armeabi:
|–|–|–.so files.
So I’ve made a lib folder and inside it an armeabi folder where I’ve inserted all the needed .so files. I then zipped the folder into a .zip (the structure inside the zip file is now lib/armeabi/*.so) I renamed the .zip file into armeabi.jar and added the line compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: '*.jar') into dependencies {} in the gradle’s build file.
This solved my problem in a rather clean way.