If you've spent any time gaming on Android, you probably remember OpenFeint. Nearly every major game integrated it in some way, usually allowing players to log in with a single username, collect achievements, and post scores to a global leaderboard. It was handy for what it did, but if you didn't care about competing, it felt a lot like obnoxious spamware. Unsurprisingly, it closed down in December of last year. Today, however, it's being sort of reborn as OpenKit, a project headed by one of the co-founders of the original service. Only this time, the idea is much cooler.

For starters, OpenKit will provide one of the most desperately needed features in mobile gaming: cloud backup of game state and save data. Meaning, if you finish up the Tattooine levels of Angry Birds Star Wars on your phone, you won't have to go through them again to unlock Hoth on your tablet. (Note: the likelihood that Rovio would actually use this system is roughly equal to the chances of a Kyocera phone being taken seriously, but you get the idea.)

It's worth pointing out that, contrary to popular belief, Android doesn't actually have this functionality built-in by default. While developers can use backup APIs to save some information, it is not designed for syncing data of saving game states. This is more for keeping a restore point for settings so a user has them when they get a new phone or lose the old one. In other words, there is still a huge need for the kind of system that OpenKit is proposing.

In addition, OpenKit would allow developers to include leaderboard and achievement trackers (yes, those will still be around), push notifications, and multiplayer features which, depending on how they're implemented, could be a huge boon for developers. Best of all, the entire thing will be open sourced and if a dev would like to host their own server instead of relying on OpenKit's, they can do that too.

Today, the program is opening up to a private beta. Five hundred developers have already signed up in the last month. No word yet on how many of those are invited in, but if you'd like to get in on this, you can sign up here.

The main problem with OpenFeint before was not the idea, but rather the intrusive way it went about it. I doubt many people would have a problem with a central login service they can use to track accomplishments so long as it doesn't break into the flow of gameplay, and developers would surely love a way to backup games across all platforms. Here's hoping OpenKit can do better than its predecessor.

Source: OpenKit