Introduction

There are situations where if you need a particular Android or iOS feature, FireMonkey does not help you. FireMonkey does a very good job in supporting all the common mobile features, but not all the APIs have been already imported, polished, and wrapped in nice Object Pascal reusable classes or components. What can you do in these cases? The good news is that you can import classes from the underlying SDK (and NDK in case of Android) and wrap them just like Embarcadero did in the FireMonkey platform.

In this chapter, we will see some classes import examples. Keep in mind that the code using imported classes is not cross-platform. That is, if you import an Android SDK class and your code uses it, you lost the possibility to compile that specific code for iOS. However, you can, as usual, use some IFDEFs to statically select the Android specific code from the iOS specific code. Moreover, in the last recipe, we'll see how to use one of the most powerful Android features: the services...