Creating a Corporate Directory App with SAP’s Cloud Platform SDK for Android

Last year, we built a corporate directory app using SAP’s Cloud Platform SDK for iOS and wrote a series of blog posts about our experience. When SAP announced the availability of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for Android, we thought it would be an educational exercise to build the same corporate directory app for Android and document our experience with the new SDK.

What we learned was really interesting: it is definitely possible to build a cross-platform app using the iOS and Android SDKs with a lot less pain, time, and effort than building from scratch on both platforms.

What we Built

We decided to build a feature- and design-equivalent app in Android, which would match what our iOS app could do while respecting the design and usage conventions of Android.

Here’s what we built:

The list pulls all the Users from Success Factors User Management and displays them alphabetically.

Adding support for basic name searching was a snap using the query capabilities provided by SAP’s SDK.

Tapping on a contact will show more detail:

The detail screen shows phone, email and location information for the contact, as well as some basic information about their employment. The message, phone, and email buttons can initiate each contact method.

So how did we build this using SAP’s Cloud Platform SDK for Android? In our next post, we will describe how we leveraged the existing project information already set up in SAP’s Cloud Portal for our iOS app, and how we used the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for Android Wizard to generate and customize an Android Studio project.