Chapter 15. Integration
This chapter covers
- Manipulating and extending Android contacts
- Managing multiple accounts
- Synchronizing data to a remote server
No phone is an island. A mobile smartphone’s primary purpose is to connect with others, whether through voice calls, email, text messaging, or some other way of reaching out. But phones have historically acted like islands when it came to storing information. You might painstakingly save phone numbers for years on your device, only to lose everything and start all over again when you switched phones.
Android leads the charge in breaking away from the old device-centric way of storing contacts and related data. Like all of Google’s services, Android looks to the cloud as a vast storage location for all your data. Integration allows your phone to stay in sync with what you care about, so you don’t need to manually copy doctors’ appointments and important emails from multiple computers to your phone.