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.

15.1. Understanding the Android contact model

15.2. Getting started with LinkedIn

15.3. Managing contacts

15.4. Keeping it together

15.5. Creating a LinkedIn account

15.6. Synchronizing to the backend with SyncAdapter

15.7. Wrapping up: LinkedIn in action

15.8. Summary