I would make this argument instead: REST or SOAP? A big part of creating a seamless experience on mobile devices is to be able to handle* limited connectivity* (temporary loss of connection) and to have *stateless* (remote) services available (user can access data directly without going through a list of other prior service-calls to get there). SOAP can't handle this very well. SOAP is very stateful. It's much like RPC where the caller often needs to be aware of the server's state to make correct calls. SOAP calls are hard to cache. And you'll need a cache if you want to handle limited connectivity. REST is better suited to deal with this. True RESTful services are stateless (you could have a cookie for authentication, for example, but no more than that should be stored in a stateful session). RESTful services are designed to handle caches efficiently. In addition, SOAP is more involved, more complex to handle. REST is much easier. If you choose REST, then there's another choice you can make: Which format? You can choose XML (applicatin/xml) or JSON (application/json) (GSON), which are 2 of the most popular formats for REST. Personally, I would choose XML because Android already includes pull and push parsing of XML data from the server. Pull and push parsing allows you to only read the parts of the REST response in which your app is interested and skip the rest: somewhat better performance, much better memory usage for larg REST responses. In short: If you can chose everything, i would choose REST services using XML.
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