I just uploaded my first Android app to the market, Facebook Sync for Android. It is very simple – it just copies your friends photos into your address book, so you see their faces when they call you. Right now that’s about all it does, but I’m hoping I can make it significantly more useful in future.
So, how was my first time?
Mostly, writing Android apps is easy and fun. Occasionally, it’s frustrating and annoying. The biggest problems I had were caused by bad documentation, buggy tools and inconsistent UI in the included apps making it hard to know what to aim for. I also wasted significant time on the RPC framework which turned out to be unnecessary – hopefully I’ll be able to submit a documentation patch soon that clarifies when you need to use it and when you don’t.
That said, Android is about a million times nicer than J2ME. How it compares to the iPhone is the real question, and I haven’t written an iPhone app so can’t do a real comparison there. I will say that I’ll put up with significant pain to get Java over Objective-C, which as far as I can tell is a stupid language with no merits at all. And I’m not a Java fan, so that’s a pretty strong statement for me.
I’ll be interested to see how much the app is used. Right now the only place contact photos are used in Android is the incoming call screen. Once you pick up, it’s gone. If you call them, it doesn’t appear. The text messaging app doesn’t use photos at all, and so on. I think this is a chicken and egg situation …. nobody is going to devote precious screen space in their app to a photo box when most people won’t have any contact photos. If syncing from social networks becomes widespread, it’ll suddenly become worthwhile to use photos more often, which I think will result in a much nicer experience.
March 25, 2009 at 9:11 am |
Mike, great app, the UI is spot on and it works perfectly. thanks for also making it free. If you’re on twitter I’d like to follow you, I’m @geekyouup and also spending a good chunk of time doing Android development.
April 25, 2009 at 5:02 am |
Hey Mike,
great app. I’m glad you made this. I’ve been trying to sync facebook pictures to my Mac Address Book application and than syncing it with gmail but have been unsuccessful. I started the app and it started to work but stopped and I consistently this error: An error was encountered during the sync. Do you have good reception here? (Facebook Exception: org.apache.http.client.HttpResponseException: Expectation failed) . Any ideas? I’ve tried restarting the app a couple of times and reseting my phone but to know avail can I get it going again. I do have over 1000 friends on facebook though. Could that be the problem?
Nathan
April 25, 2009 at 10:05 am |
Hey Nathan,
I’m surprised that error is occurring during sync. I’ve seen it when POSTing data but not otherwise. I’ll take a look at the crash logs and try to figure it out, thanks for the report.
June 9, 2009 at 2:32 pm |
Hi,
I used your app and it worked great syncing all the contacts I had in my phone and facebook nicely, however, I recently had to wipe and reset my phone and now when I run your app it connects to Facebook but then throws an error:
An error was encountered during the sync.
(NegativeArraySizeException: null)
It doesn’t seem to have sync’d any of my contacts photos. I tried uninstalling, reinstalling and re-running the app but to no avail. Do you know what might be up?
Thanks
PS. I tried to email you through mike+fbsync@plan99.net but it bounced straight back.
June 15, 2009 at 5:34 pm |
Nice nice app. This is the only reason I reopened my ever stalking facebook. Wouldnt it be cool to have a similar app but that could log into Windows Live MSN instead to grab the pictures?. It would be easier to compare emails (contacts & msn’s) for a perfect match.. and then if no mail use profile name/last name as it currently does.
August 5, 2009 at 8:29 am |
Hi Mike,
Great app.
One enhancement I’d like to see is to be able to manually link names in facebook and contacts (and have the app remember those links). E.g., I have ‘Billy Smith’ in my contacts, and ‘William Smith’ in Facebook, it’d be great if I could indicate that they are one and the same person.
Ross Dargan implemented this in the Facebook/Outlook sync app Fonebook*, and it works really well.
By the way, I can’t see Facebook Sync in the Android Market. Did you pull it?
* http://www.developingtrends.co.uk/Software/Facebook/Fonebook/Default.aspx
August 23, 2009 at 7:46 am |
Hey Mike,
I love the Facebook Sync app and hope that you soon republish with naming issues resolved. Personally I’d love to see the sync do more than photos; I want to have my entire Facebook contacts cleanly ported like the Palm Pre does. It is the start of something very good and very needed.
/Ryan
September 21, 2009 at 3:21 pm |
Hey, Facebook Sync is a great app, thanks for all your work! I had this app on my G1 and loved it. Now I have a myTouch 3G and realized it’s no longer in the market (trademark issues?). Is there anywhere I can download this app still?