Google is offering back-end functionality for Android applications including data storage, cloud messaging, and authentication.
At I/O 2013 Google has announced the general availability of their Mobile Backend Starter, a solution for developing Android applications, having two major components: a back-end data store running on GAE and a Java library handling all the back-end related tasks for the client.
The back-end runs inside Google Cloud providing a number of services for mobile applications:
- Data Storage for saving user data
- Pub/Sub for 1-to-1 or 1-to-many messaging
- Push Notifications for sending notifications to devices
- Continuous Queries for updating client devices with new bits of data
- Authentication and Authorization for user protection
An Android client is available containing the source code of the Backend Starter and two sample applications, Guestbook and Social Talk, showing how to put it all together.
According to Google, the free tier is enough for “hundreds of users”, enough to get started, then one can scale out using their infrastructure as more users are added.