Gmail functionality has been augmented for some time now by app developers using the gmail-ls content provider.. now i know that the default response in mentioning this is "it's not supported, not intended to be used by 3rd parties, and is actively discouraged", but nonetheless some developers have put it to good use providing important features to users.
With honeycomb, something has changed with the provider, thus breaking the functionality of these apps, and yes i realise again the response will be "tough luck, thats what happens when you use unsupported apis and functionality", and i *completely* appreciate that. What i'm interested in is more if there will ever be concrete support for developers to access the gmail content provider or some equivalent api to provide the kind of functionality people actively require these days? I don't know what has changed with the content provider exactly, it could be something trivial, or perhaps its now locked down because of concerns regarding applications accessing user emails for some reason, but the reason i'm asking is primarily because, to developers that aim to augment gmail usage for users on android, they face two ways of achieving this: 1. use the gmail content provider, or 2. implement their own binding to gmail to access the data they require, using something heavyweight like javamail. With option 1. users are informed via manifest permissions that an application will be accessing their gmail data (and informed whether it's just read, or r/w access), and the overhead of potential apps can be minimised thanks to relying on the existing db, and the presumably fairly well designed and efficient background services for maintaining said db and communicating with the gmail servers. With option 2. users won't necessarily have that obvious flag that the app is using the gmail data (albeit at some point they will have to authenticate via the app), and the developer will have to implement a custom solution for monitoring changes to mail, leading to more background services, with potentially multiple solutions polling the imap servers indiscriminately or worse, periodically hitting up the atom feeds, duplicating functionality and eating up cpu time, battery life, and network bandwidth. I realise this probably isn't the best mailing list to try, and that the google apps are maintained as a separate project from android as such, but i'm hoping someone on the gmail team sees this and some thought can be put into supporting developers here. Perhaps it's a trivial change that some enterprising soul will figure out, but regardless i think formalising support for things like this would be of benefit to everyone, rather than the current "don't ask, don't tell" policy of using unsupported content providers like this. Cheers. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
