Creating a Stack Overflow notifier
- by Trey
I could not find a Stack Overflow notifier Android app so I am planning on making one. I hope that my app will serve a similar purpose as the Stack Overflow Notifier Chrome extension. This will be my first Android app so I am still unfamiliar with the platform.
My main concern when creating this app is, what is the proper way to access the user's Recent Activity page?
I thought of two different approaches but I'm not sure how to implement either one:
Make the user login to Stack Overflow through the Browser application or an embedded browser and scrape their recent activity page occasionally for updates.
Ask the user for their username and password and forward this information to Stack Overflow for authentication, storing cookies somehow to keep the session active.
I think Astrid uses something similar to the first approach, but I haven't been able to figure it out yet from skimming their code.
What is the correct way to handle a notification application like this that requires session management?