Are there libraries similar to the Three20 Project for Android?

Question

The Three20 project is really nice for building iPhone apps quickly using common libraries:

https://github.com/facebook/three20

Is there anything like this for Android?

Answer 1

Not exactly, but working at a company with a partially three20 based iPhone app developed in parallel with the Android version, I think about 50% of what 320 does you get right out of the platform on Android, minus a little polish. For example, 320's Navigator and TextEditor are basically baked in on Android - the platform's native text editing components can stretch dynamically on their own, and task navigation and back-button history is handled automatically on Android, with URL handling baked in to the intent filter and resolution system.

You can get much of the rest of 320's functionality out of reusable libraries like ignition or GreenDroid (at least with regards to caching and images loading in lists), without the weight and lock-in a fairly monolithic framework like 320 can add to your app. There's a few bits that these solutions miss (three20's zoomable photo viewer, for instance), but there's usually acceptable hackarounds for quick usage (an Android WebView makes a pretty decent image viewer substitute, for instance).

Once upon a time there was an SO wiki page gathering a bunch of those resources, but alas, that's gone away. You can get a pretty good set by looking for popular Android projects on GitHub or Google Code, though.