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Part I: The Nuts and Bolts of Android
With all the APIs that Android includes, it’s easy to use two or more of these
features to make your own app. You can use a maps API with the contact list
to show all your contacts on a map, for example (see “Google APIs,” later in
this chapter).
Here are a few other mashups to get your brain juices pumping. All this stuff
is included for you to use, and it’s completely legal and free!
✓ Geolocation and social networking: Social networking is the “in” thing
right now. Suppose you want to write an app that tweets your current
location every 10 minutes throughout the day. You can, and it’s easy.
Use Android’s location services and a third-party Twitter API (such as
iTwitter), and you can do just that.
✓ Geolocation and gaming: Location-based gaming is gaining popularity.
It’s a great way to really put your users into the game. A game might run
a background service to check your current location and compare it
with the locations of other users of the game in the same area. If another
user is within 1 mile of you, for example, you could be notified, and you
could challenge her to a battle. None of this would be possible without a
strong platform such as Android and GPS technology.
✓ Contacts and Internet: With all these cool APIs at your disposal, it’s
easy to make full-featured apps by combining the functionality of two
or more APIs. You can combine contacts and the Internet to create a
greeting-card app, for example. Or you may just want to add an easy way
for your users to contact you from an app or enable users to send the
app to their friends. This is all possible with the built-in APIs.
The sky is the limit. All this cool functionality is literally in the palm of your
hand. If you want to develop an app that records the geographic location of
the device, you can with ease. Android really opens the possibilities by allow-
ing you to tap into these features easily. It’s up to you, as the developer, to
put them together in a way that can benefit your users.
Developers can do just about anything they want with Android, so be careful.
Use your best judgment when creating and publishing apps for mass con-
sumption. Just because you want a live wallpaper that shows you doing the
hula in your birthday suit doesn’t mean that anyone else wants to see it.
Also, keep privacy laws in mind before you harvest your users’ contact info
for your own marketing scheme.
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