Let the LogCat out of the bag

So far, I hope you’ve been convinced that Minimob is a good way to talk to your users. How about using it to talk to your application, as well?

You need to make your application able to read some of the things you tell your users. For example, the current list of top scorers.

The secret ingredient to this Magick is logcat, the Android log viewer. See how easy is to get at your messages, provided you use a standard format that you can parse from within your app.

Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("logcat -s \"minimob\"");
BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()));
while ((line = bufferedReader.readLine()) != null) {
    //look for your specially formatted text here
}

(Obviously, you need to take care of exception handling and resource deallocation which this sample does not contain in order for it to stay simple).

Note that this kind of communication is not an out-of-band one. You are still talking to your users, primarily, so don’t send base64 encoded stuff or anything like that!