The application mimics an Instagram-style application where users can take photos, share them publicly, follow other users, see a notification feed and aggregated data along the way. For more information please check out our blog post.
We're covering some "best practice" examples of how to set up a mobile application powered with Stream APIs, and we're happy to announce this Android example to share. As with all of our example code, the project is open sourced and available on GitHub. We have also submitted the application to the Google Play Store for ease of installation.
You can read more about the Android client, the Go service that powers it, and our recommendations for feed setup on our blog
Our primary goal of this Android app was to showcase our best practices for communicating a mobile app and a backend service. We do want to address several things up front about building a mobile application with Stream. Most importantly, we do not recommend that you build an application where your API key and secret are embedded within or otherwise accessible to the mobile application -- our best practice is that your mobile application communicate with a fast backend API hosted on your own systems, and that this backend application would communicate with Stream.
This Android shows how to perform asynchronous HTTP operations to fetch various kinds of feeds and present that data to your users. In the interest of time to develop this project, we took several shortcuts along the way:
- Our mobile application does not perform secure communication with the backend process; please incorporate secure best practices for something like JWT over SSL between your mobile app and your backend.
- We took a shortcut on authentication using only usernames and email addresses; again, please follow security best practices around authentication.
- We do not utilize feed filters to only pull the latest data; we do recommend that feed data be cached on the mobile device and refreshed using the newest/oldest activity identifier to minimize data transfer on mobile devices.
- There may be optimizations in how the Android application operates, manages photos and orientation, and we would be happy to review ideas and pull requests from our community.