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Making the most of
user data on Android
Matt Oakes
@matto1990
[email protected]
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User data
• Loads of data already on the phone to use
• Its personal to the user
• Contacts
• Accounts
• Relevant to now
• Location
• Calendar
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Why bother?
• Customise your app to the user from first
run
• Save the user time by predicting actions
• Surprise them with what you know
• (be careful not to scare them!)
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Case Studies
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Some Basics
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Intents
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Explicit Intents
• Every app uses them
• Explicitly says what activity you want to go
to
• Should only be used internally in an app
• Don’t use between apps
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Generic Intent
• Can request other applications open
• Opens the most relevant application
• User can choose which they want to open if
they have more than one
• App can also get a result back for the opened
application
• You don’t even need to know what the
application you’re opening is
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Web URLs
• Can open one of your activities by going to
a url
• Will open if the user clicks a link in their
browser (or another app)
• Useful if you have a web version of your
app that people might link to that you want
the native app to take over from
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OpenIntents.org
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Magically getting emails
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Why?
• A lot of apps ask for email as a login
• Email addresses are long and sometimes
complicated!
• Most users will already have an account
signed in on the phone
• You can therefore ask for access to their
email addresses, and save them the typing
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Shiny new way to do it
• Available from 4.0 and up (ICS)
• Phone profile
• Permission required
• android.permission.READ_PROFILE
• Users will have to have filled out their
profile. Which Android tries to get them to
do on first startup
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Pre-ICS Method
• Available from 2.0 and up (Eclair)
• As of 1st May 2012 that’s 99% of users
• Account information is stored on the
phone
• Can read the name of the account, which is
the email
• Required permission
• android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS
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Sharing
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Never roll your own
• Android has an amazing sharing framework
• Apps state that they are able to share data of a certain type
• Twitter sharing text and images
• Dropbox can handle any file or text
• Other apps say they have data to share
• The user is presented with a list of all apps that can handle
that data
• The apps they have installed are likely the only ones they
care about
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Media
• Photos for example
• Can call other apps when you want users
to pick media
• Can get other apps to open your app to
choose data from your service
• Could be used if you have photos/video
which isn’t on the device but the user
might want
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Content providers
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What?
• They provide access to content (durrr)
• They can be used across applications
• One app can provide data to another
• They are used for data that’s built into Android
• Messages
• Contacts
• Calendar
• Media (Music, photos etc.)
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Contacts
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Contacts
• You should use this whenever the user is
entering the name or email of a friend
• Saves them typing
• They’re more likely to type people in if it’s
easy
• Can enhance the view with the friends
profile picture
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What the user
sees
A contact from
an application
Each piece of
data is a row
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Calendar
• You know what the user is up (or meant to
be) right now
• Can use the event location to tailor data
• Would be great for weather apps
• Can tell users what the weather is at
each of their events
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Location
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Where art thou?
• Can tailor search results based on the
current location
• Great for anything to do with local
businesses or events
• Really well used
• Fairly tricky to do it right
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Reto Meier - Deep dive
into location
http://goo.gl/NFDmW
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Wrap up
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Do it!
• Lots of ways to get data
• Tailor you app based on the users data
• Tailor your app to current condition
• Location
• Even a barometer (?!?!?)
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Matt Oakes
@matto1990
[email protected]
Example code on
GitHub
http://goo.gl/XfyMJ