>> >> It is entirely possible that Google could create this database. Ms. >> Hackborn hinted as much in a post here a couple of years back. I am >> not holding my breath waiting for it, though. >> >> > > > Neither do I. Which is a pity since intents are such a good mean to > enhances apps mutually without spending xx months to write that other > specialized apps. > Too bad the concept is not further enhanced to push automatic discovery > further, in a safe way. >
If you want to do this from a purely opt in standpoint, there's no lack of technology. The problem with this isn't that people don't know they can do it, it's that people don't feel any community incentive to do so. Let's be honest, most of the apps that people actually have on their phone are written by people who -- at the current time -- don't really have that much incentive to provide third party intents to their apps. The natural tendency of this is that, the vast majority of people, just don't have that many apps installed on their phones. And if you told someone "to use my app X, you need to install apps Y and Z," the immediate response is most likely going to push the back button and download an app which does X without Y and Z, because that's just how it is. It would be awesome if we could have these little bits of functionality that we could use that didn't come with the high overhead UX impact of downloading other apps and having them on their devices (with limited memory) for "no reason" (from the user's perspective). And in reality, if you're using an app for one intent, and the rest of the app just sits there, it's a bit of a waste of space. Sure, some things are cool, if Facebook or Twitter have intents that you can use to share stuff, etc..., this would be great, but there just aren't that many examples of that. Not to mention that designing a good interface that you can hook into (that makes sense with a global system semantics, rather than just inside the app) takes a while to do, and if the developer has no incentive to write this kind of thing, they're just not going to take the time to do so.. I still think this is a cool idea. If you want to pick a file, why write your own file picker (or have one bloat inside your app). Collections of intents allow you to "script up" an app really quickly, and you could imagine combining lots of intents in a concatenative-ese style that would allow you to combine different intents and use them to make a large app. I've thought about this some, but at the current time, as I said, intents just don't work like that.. Kris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
