Chapter 12. Social Patterns

So far in this book, we have covered many of the aspects of mobile app development. However, even the best designed and most useful application can benefit enormously from employing social media and other web content.

The sandwich builder app we covered in earlier chapters is a good example of an app that could have its circulation boosted by generating Facebook likes and tweets, and these and other social media all provide technologies to incorporate such features directly into our app.

As well as incorporating existing social media platforms into our apps, we can embed any web content we like right into an activity with the WebView class. This extension of the view class can be used to add a single web page to an app or even build a complete web application. The WebView class is extremely useful when we have products or data that need regular updating, as this can be achieved without having to recode and release updates.

We will start this chapter by...