You have been working too hard if you haven’t seen the commercials for the Motorola Droid phones and that ‘Droid Does’. Well, without getting into too much technicalities, there aren’t many mobile applications out there that use RETS to directly connect to RE Data in a mobile device (there is also a lot of argument if pure RETS connectivity in its current form is even proper on a mobile device – but that is open to ALOT of debate). With that being said, as far as I know, Droid Doesn’t do RETS (please let me know if that I am unaware of a Android RETS project).

Well, that is until now. CRT put some research into understanding the Android Development Environment and what it would take to create a fully native RETS RE Data Download Utility and then build a prototype search interface integrating some of the Android functionality (mapping, email) with pure data from an MLS RETS Feed. The project was a journey in discovery, and proved more difficult than initially thought – however now we are releasing an open source working prototype framework, that could be used in creating bigger better Mobile Android RETS applications.

The project is called AREA-F (Android Real Estate Application Framework) – and today is its offical announcement. You can learn more and comment on the project itself at its project home. The current state of the project is proof-of-concept/prototype, but there is a lot there to not only help with understanding Android development, but also in expanding this initial concept into other applications.

It should be noted, that there were a lot of trials and tribulations with trying to get all the pieces to work for this project. However, through that, we also published a whitepaper documenting the Andorid Development Environment learning process and the creation of the search utility.

Mobile is the next frontier for all industries. Hopefully AREA-F will help some developers out there get a kick start in developing RETS applications for the Android.