Extending / Reimplementing Applications

Question

Ultimately I wish to produce a compressive Contact Manager with some specific features. I thought it would be good to experiment by extending Contact. So using git I checked out froyo-release and tried to build it. That didn't work so well as it contains things like

import com.android.internal.telephony.CallerInfo;

and friends. I'm considering the following two approaches:

1. Suppress the internal stuff under the assumption that I really don't need it.
2. Start with a toy Contact Manager and implement (reinvent) everything.

My guess is that I am going about this incorrectly. "I want that third alternative" --kirk.

Just for completeness, the new special behavior is to provide an action list for a contact based on the types of that entities data.

Answer 1

A lot of the applications that ship with the platform unfortunately make use of non-public api's, which means they require a lot of hacking to build as sdk apps.

You can build them as part of a full platform build, or you can modify them to connect to the private api's via reflection or by including stubs for the private api functions that will get automatically stripped out later (as their names conflict with the real ones) - but if you want the result of your work to be something you can portably and reliably distribute other than as part of a rom upgrade, you probably need to rework things to use only public APIs.