Announcing Android Support for Mobile Services

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I'm extremely excited to announce the release of our official Android SDK for Windows Azure Mobile Services. Android developers now have easy access to structured data storage, authentication, push notifications using Google Cloud Messaging(GCM) and more in the form of a native Java SDK. This SDK joins the Windows Store, Windows Phone 8, and iOS SDKs that we've already released. When we first launched Mobile Services, we said our goal was to enable any application developer to connect their app to a backend hosted in Windows Azure. Today’s announcement means that even more mobile developers can be Microsoft developers by easily consuming Windows Azure services for their backend.

For this release, the Windows Azure team worked with Microsoft Open Technologies. MS Open Tech developed the SDK and the Windows Azure team worked on the portal integration and push notifications. The native Java SDK for Android developers can be used for applications destined for the Google Play Store, Amazon App Store, or any other Android app store. Additionally, integrated support for push notifications with GCM has been added to server scripts. Like the other Mobile Services SDKs, the Android SDK will be open sourced on GitHub. You can access the GitHub repository here. Going forward, the plan is to keep improvements to each SDK the same when possible.

New Content

WindowsAzure.com – Developers will see changes to the Mobile Services Dev Center at WindowsAzure.com.  These changes include Android focused tutorials on creating a new mobile service, getting started with data, and handling user authentication.  These will join the tutorials already present for the other client platforms.

Android Samples - We've created two samples that are focused on demonstrating common scenarios when using Mobile Services with Android.  Both of these scenarios focus on the data storage aspect of Mobile Services though we'll be adding samples that take advantage of the other capabilities of Mobile Services soon. 

 

Feedback

This sample demonstrates how you can use Mobile Services to get feedback data from your application and store it to Mobile Services.  The sample was built so that a developer could easily take the code and UI involved and place it into their own applications.  You can access the GitHub repo for this sample here.

Tic Tac Toe Leaderboard

This sample demonstrates how you can use Mobile Services to store and serve up a leaderboard for a game.  In this scenario the game is Tic Tac Toe, and each win, loss, or tie will be recorded for the current player.  The leaderboard will display each player ranked from best to worst.  You can access the GitHub repo for this sample here.

As always, stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows 8, Windows Azure and other Microsoft developer announcements, updates, and links: @clinted