How To Develop An ANDROID Application

How to Develop an Android App
I have worked on a couple of web apps before - like sleepingtime.org, ctrlq.org or the AdSense Sandbox - but developing mobile apps for the Android platform was a completely unchartered territory.

Fortunately, the process for building Android apps wasn't complicated and anyone with knowledge of HTML and JavaScript can create a native Android App with some effort.

You create a mobile-friendly page using standard HTML tags and fetch data into the page from WordPress with the help of RSS feeds. You then include the impressive jQuery Mobile library in the page to handle the styling (layout) and navigation across different mobile platforms. Next you convert this HTML page into a native Android App (apk) using Phonegap, another free and awesome tool.

Android App for your WordPress Blog


If you would like to have a native Android App for your own blog, here are some of the technical details that you should know. I created an app for WordPress but the process is similar for other platforms as long as they offer content through RSS feeds.

First you to get familiar with jQuery and jQuery Mobile. There are tons of online tutorials for beginners or get one of the excellent books to quickly get started.

The app is essentially an HTML document where each div section represents the various screen of the app. The page transitions, AJAX effects - notice that "page loading" message when you move between pages - and even the screen layouts (or CSS styles) are handled automatically by the jQuery Mobile library.

The app fetches data (blog posts) from the WordPress blog using standard RSS feeds. These feed requests to WordPress are routed through Google Feeds API to bypass the security restrictions around cross-domain scripting. If you wish to display image thumbnails alongside the titles, make sure to add the Media RSS element in your WordPress feeds.