Designing For Android - Smashing Magazine. For designers, Android is the elephant in the room when it comes to app design.
As much as designers would like to think it’s an iOS1 world in which all anyones cares about are iPhones, iPads and the App Store, nobody can ignore that Android currently has the majority of smartphone market share2 and that it is being used on everything from tablets to e-readers. In short, the Google Android platform is quickly becoming ubiquitous, and brands are starting to notice. But let’s face it. Android’s multiple devices and form factors make it feel like designing for it is an uphill battle.
And its cryptic documentation3 is hardly a starting point for designing and producing great apps. Intents List: Invoking Google Applications on Android Devices. An intent allows you to start an activity in another app by describing a simple action you'd like to perform (such as "view a map" or "take a picture") in an Intent object.
This type of intent is called an implicit intent because it does not specify the app component to start, but instead specifies an action and provides some data with which to perform the action. This page describes several implicit intents that you can use to perform common actions, organized by the type of app that handles the intent. Each section also shows how you can create an intent filter to advertise your app's ability to perform the same action.