Plugin Management for an Android application

Question

We want to develop and extensible Android application, and are looking for a way to handle plugins.

What do you think would be the best approach:

• Using Android's PackageManager. The problem here is that the PM isn't designed with plugins in mind, so we'd have to implement functionalities such as dependency checks ourselves.

• Using an existing Java framework such as JPF (Java Plugin Framework) or OSGi. OSGi looks too massive for us, and there's isn't too much information available about JPF on Android.

• Other ideas?

Answer 1

What exactly do you mean with "plugin"? With the Intent and IntentFilter concept you can already do many things I would call "plugin". For example, you can allow other applications to add entries in your context menu.