This mobile thing will never last, right? We figured if we waited long enough, this whole “mobile application” thing would blow over and everything would go back to the way it used to be. You know, when phones were for calling people, and computers were for typing long, angry rants about how things aren’t the way they used to be.
In retrospect, we may have misread that one a bit. It turns out that even for Stack Exchange mobile is eating the world.
So today we’re excited to announce that Stack Exchange for Android is finally available for download on the Google Play store, for Android phones version 4.0 (ICS) and up:
What? You’re an iPhone user? Don’t worry, the iPhone alpha is coming soon, probably in the next six to eight weeks. In fact, you can sign up for the iPhone alpha starting today . We’ll be inviting people in waves on a first-come, first-served basis over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, keep reading to find out what’s new in the app.
One Feed to rule them all
Translating Stack Exchange to mobile was… tricky. We have over 120 communities in the Stack Exchange network. On the web they exist as mostly separate sites. We’re pretty new to mobile development, but we felt that releasing 120 mobile apps was probably not the right approach.
That meant we had to create an entirely new experience, one that didn’t exist on the web. A single, central location where you can check in on everything relevant to you across the network, whether you participate on one site or many. We dubbed it (not terribly creatively) “The Feed”. Here’s what it looks like:
This is a completely new feature for Stack Exchange. It includes:
- Customized recommendations of questions you can answer, based on the sites and tags you participate in
- Interesting questions tailored to your interests that will learn from your activity and get better over time
- Updates when you get upvoted or your answers get accepted, so you can feel good about helping others wherever you are
- All your replies (answers, comments, chat messages, etc.) in one easy timeline
- Community events, blog posts, and even recommended jobs for you from Careers
The Feed scales to your activity: if you’re only participate on one site, it’ll show you mostly questions from that site. If you participate on many, you’ll see all your updates in one convenient place.
Notifications
We’ve had instant notifications of replies on the site for a while, but now you can take them with you wherever you go. You’ll get notified anytime you would get an inbox message on Stack Exchange, which includes answers, comments, chat replies, and more.
Don’t want those notifications? You can easily turn them on and off via settings, including whether they make noise or vibrate. You can even set quiet hours so you don’t get woken in the middle of the night.
Search, Ask, Answer, Comment, and Vote
And, of course, all the major things you can do on Stack Exchange are fully supported on the app: you can search for questions, ask or answer new questions, leave comments, vote, and even flag or vote to close.
If you want, you can configure your phone to automatically open the app when clicking URLs on websites to make getting into the app even easier.
Why Android first? What about iPhone?
We set out to create a fully native experience for each platform. That meant designing the app twice, once for each platform, to make sure it felt right to users of each. We started with Android mostly because we’re new to mobile, and the Google Play Store process is more forgiving if we make mistakes!
If you’re an iPhone user, sign up for the iPhone alpha today! We’ll start inviting alpha testers soon, and hope to launch the iPhone app in a few short months.
What about tablet / chat / missing feature X?
This is just the first version, and we plan to keep working on both of the apps in parallel. A tablet optimized version of the app is next, and then we’ll start adding in missing features based on what you tell us we’re missing. So if there’s something you’d like to see in the app, let us know on Meta under the ‘android-app’ tag.
Let us know how we’re doing
This is still a work in progress! Take the app for a spin and let us know what you think on meta. We’ll be working hard to keep improving it over the coming weeks and months. So download it today!
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37 Comments
Any chance we can get this on the Kindle store for the Kindle Fire as well?
When installing the app, it requests permissions to access my Phonebook.
Why do you need access to my Phonebook?
@Chaim: NSA asked for it.
@Chaim Here’s a list of every permission we request and the reasoning behind it: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/217345/what-are-the-permissions-the-android-app-needs-including-phone-call-ones/217378#217378
The “phonebook” permission is really “read phone status and identity” which is really badly named for what it does. Details are in the link.
It’s quite spiffy. Would be cool if it could also alert on blog announcement posts such as this one.
@JoshDM community bulletins are in the app, so when this posts get turned into one (*cough* *cough*) it’ll pop up in the feed.
@Kasra: See http://android-developers.blogspot.de/2011/03/identifying-app-installations.html for other ways to identify an installation. The phone id is only needed if you want to track a device across apps. For example if you want to allow ad partners to create a full profile of your users, so that they know what software you like, or movies, or panties…
Darn. Requires ICS or higher. Just one more reason to upgrade my phone. Looking forward to trying it on my tablet tonight, though.
And what about windows?
Looking forward to getting an iPhone and iPad version.
Yeah, Europe need WinPhone version
Well, that and Android is the bigger market, has been gaining huge amounts of market share in the last few years while iOS has been losing it, and is far more friendly to developers in general, who are still the core of StackExchange despite the 120 communities. ;)
The only question I’d ask along those lines is, why even bother with an iOS version?
I recognize the mobile boom, but I don’t really get it. Browsing a web site and answering questions on a *phone?* There are few everyday experiences I find more torturous and pointless, and I’ve tried.
Anyway, great work! The app looks beautiful and nice to use. I’m sure some of the mobile features will trickle back to the default site over time.
I’d be happy to be an alpha user on the iPad once that comes up.
Windows Phone please :)
Google Play only? Any plans to release the .apk, or put it on a third-party market like FDroid or the Amazon App Store?
Looks like a great app but I’m running Android without any Google services and have no way to download it.
Downloaded..Great Stuff..{Upvote}..Cheers..:)
And now for the big question… any chance the source code will eventually be released? Also, this app uses an undocumented version of the Stack Exchange API (2.2). Any chance we’ll hear an announcement about that soon too?
I doubt we’ll open source the app, there are too many private calls for it to be useful I suspect. Some libraries might get released though.
We are dog-fooding API version 2.2 for all the public functionality. Expect an announcement in the next couple of weeks, it’s pretty close to finished in my opinion.
Great work, but why did you write your blog post so late? I was yesterday able to write the first comment about your app.
@Rekire we soft launched to all our existing beta users. It doesn’t really matter to us if some folks got early access, and a soft launch let us watch for any show stoppers.
Windows Phone Requests++;
Did you guys use the Xamarin product to write these apps, or each in their native language?
@john Each is native. Naturally there’s a lot of shared function in the backend, which is all .NET.
@Chris the READ_PHONE_STATE permission (alongside the GET_TASKS) permission are both removed for version 1.0.2 (not out yet).
Awesome job, now looking forward for the iOS app! :)
At last… the Gods gave us a toy for our crusades. Thanks – love it!
As already said:
Looks like a great app but I’m running Android without any Google services and have no way to download it.
Really slick. I like it. Nice work to all involved.
+1 to all above. I just downloaded the 3rd party SOClient a couple days ago and said to myself “they’ve got to be working on something better”… thanks to the team!
Surprised you guys didn’t use Xamarin.
Does windows not matter to you? A lot of people use Windows Phone and Windows 8
The app looks great…
(On a side note: you get a feeling for how much SE has messed with your head when you find yourself scrolling to the top of the blog post to upvote. :P)
What about WP / WS versions? Should we start doing them by self or wait when you’ll release them?
Android first?
Like the Windows server strategy, a bit of a disappointing choice of platform.
Another upvote for a Windows Phone version.
Two questions…
Why not allow Froyo/gingerbread phones? Many still prefer/use those devices – or is the app designed more for tablets?
Also, are you guys going to post this in F-Droid repository for non Google users?
We haven’t the google play in China. So please help release the apk to be downloaded in other place as well.