The other day I was working on one of my side projects written in Ruby on Rails, and I was in need of a gem (third party libraries are called gems in Ruby) for performing syntax highlighting. After a few seconds of research, I stumbled upon this page from The Ruby Toolbox which lists all the available gems for handling this particular task. That is clever! Now, whenever I need to do a task that I think could be better achieved using a gem, I just go to The Ruby Toolbox looking for the right category and I can see how good the community think the gem is and how many times it has been downloaded. Ultimately, in 5 mins I am able to pickup the right gem for the particular task that I am trying to achieve.

I want to build the same thing for Android! The reason for this is that I can’t think of any place where I can find a list of third party libraries targeting Android development. Of course, we have things like Android UI Patterns that list a fair amount of libraries but as its name suggests, it is only related to UI Patterns and nobody can contribute by suggesting new libraries, nor is it possible to rate those libraries.

As far as the requirements are concerned, the user should be able to:

Browse and download libraries by category (Barcodes scanning, In-App payement, Advertisement, Geolocation, UI Patterns, Social, Data Oriented libraries, Testing libraries etc.).

Rate and post feedbacks on any library.

Propose a new library.

But before I start working on this, I would like to get your feedbacks on this idea. There is also a fair amount of chance that this project does already exist in a way or another (even if I have done some research and haven’t found anything close to what I have just described).

Finally, I would like to know if there are people interested in joining me on this project. Two guys can do a better work than one guy, if only because they can bounce ideas off of each other. So if you are interested, I definitely want to talk to you!

That’s it! Looking forward to reading your comments on this!