14 DAY TRIAL // Android developers can now benefit from a Facebook SDK when it comes to the building of software solutions for handsets powered by Google's mobile operating system. The Android Software Development Kit from Facebook went live on Thursday, enabling devs to integrate Facebook into their own applications via simple code additions.
“We're really excited to launch the beta version of the Facebook SDK for Android, which we demoed at Google I/O in San Francisco last week. Over 100 million people use Facebook on their mobile phones every month, and Android is one of the fastest growing mobile platforms. We're open-sourcing tools and example code that make it simple for the thousands of Android developers to integrate Facebook Platform into their applications and reach a large and ever-growing mobile audience,” Steven Soneff, an engineer from the Facebook Mobile Platform team, notes in a post on the website's blog.
The release of Facebook SDK for Android further expands the reach of the social networking site on mobile platforms, which already includes iPhone apps and mobile websites. Among the Facebook Platform features that can be integrated into Facebook at the moment, he lists Strong authentication using OAuth 2.0, Making requests to the new Graph API, or Publishing stories back to Facebook via Feed forms. All that is needed to make an Android application social includes some lines of Java.
Currently, the SDK, which is available for download here, is tagged as an alpha release. The library is open source, in case there are some interested in taking a look at it, the underlying APIs are said to be generally stable, yet changes to the library might emerge as result of developers' feedback. The lightweight SDK does not need external dependencies and developers should be able to get started pretty easy, though there are a series of known issues that they should be aware of, all detailed here. Stay tuned for more updates on the matter.