Chapter 10
Channeling the Outside World through Your Android Device
In This Chapter
- Understanding the capabilities of your device to access the outside world
- Opening a browser from your app
- Incorporating a browser view in your application
- Accessing information on the web using a web service
- Finding your phone's location
- Incorporating maps into your app
- Understanding design issues with web and location-based apps
Your Android device is your portal to the world. You can use it to interact with other people, see what else is going on in the rest of the world, and find out what's around you — shopping, dining, and local points of interest, for example.
Your Android device can do all this because of apps that can use the web, location-based services provided by a variety of providers (in particular, Google), and the device's own, built-in, location-finding capability.
We cover many topics in this chapter, from simply launching a browser from a URL, to embedding a browser in your application, to embedding and controlling a map based on device location. It's exciting stuff! This chapter first shows you how to write apps that can, for example, browse the web, call web services that provide you with specific services and information, present maps of places that might interest you, and indicate where you are on a map. The chapter also reveals the true potential of Android apps, by describing the capabilities that exist on your device and on the Internet to use external services — in ...
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