Introducing the Textile Android SDK

The easiest way to run Textile and IPFS in your native app

One of our goals at Textile is to make it as easy as possible to build distributed applications on Textile and IPFS technology. We’re making more and more progress on that goal every day.

Today we’re excited to release the first version of the Textile SDK for Android. Like our recent iOS release, the Andriod SDK expands the number of platforms available for Textile development. This is exciting because it allows Textile-enabled Android apps to not only communicate with each other, but to communicate with Textile-enabled apps on any of our supported platforms (already linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, and desktop web!).

As with all Textile libraries, the Android SDK enables apps to run Textile and IPFS peers natively (directly on mobile devices in this case), leverage easy to use distributed databases called Threads, and call APIs that make encryption, storage, and sharing of data over IPFS easy and secure.

Let’s take a look at a couple quick examples.

Create a Thread, Textile’s distributed database:

This Thread can now be used to share media, messages, and annotations with any other Textile user that is participating in the Thread.

Invite another Textile user to a Thread:

The Contact you added to the Thread will receive an invitation and can now view the contents of, and share data to, the Thread.

We’re super excited to see what Android apps can be built with the new SDK, and we have plans to keep improving and expanding it’s capabilities. Star or watch the GitHub repo and check out the docs to learn more about how to build resilient, decentralized Android apps.