I Can Install Apps Via Email

I'm on a roll now.

If I understand what I've read, I should be able to install apps by emailing them to myself.

1. I disconnect the phone and uninstall the app.
2. On my netbook, I attach the .apk file to a gmail message and email it to myself.
3. I pick up my phone, go to my Gmail, and there's the message. I click on the attachment.
4. The phone asks me if I want to install the .apk.  Yes, I do.
5. The app installs, I open it. It works!

There's an icon for it in my list of apps. It's really installed.

Oho. This trick should work for any Android device.

I pull out my Nexus 7 tablet. Look ma, no cables.

I know that it will install non-Play apps, because I have some from the Amazon store. 

On the tablet, I go to Gmail, the message is still there, in my inbox, albeit read. Again, I click on the attachment. Again, the app installs and works. There's an icon for it in my list of apps, so it's really installed.

Yesterday, Katie, the Caffe Sole barista, pointed at my Beagleboard and said, "What's that? An external hard drive?"

I said, "No, it's an external computer." I showed her the Android GUI, and explained that she was seeing a "Desktop" on a completely separate computer.

"That totally rocks!" she said.

I go back to my app and change the strings (res/values/strings.xml) so that instead of saying, "Enter a string." it says "Enter Katie\'s string." Eclipse explains that I need to escape the single quote. 

I also change the second activity, which displays the string I enter after I press the Send button, (To do this, I have to look up how to append to a string in Java, and hope that the code in the second activity is handling multi-line strings, but that makes it a good experiment.)

I can't figure out how to rebuild the .apk, so I go back, use the AVD manager to create and bring up an emulator, and click "Run" to get it onto the emulator. This both verifies that my changes worked, and rebuilds the apk.

I attach the apk to a mail message, install it on my tablet (which asks me if  I want to "install an update"), put the icon on the home screen, and take it over to Katie, behind the counter.

"Press this," I say. She presses the clock in the center of the screen.

I bring back the home screen, point to the little, green, Android icon, labelled MyFirstApp, and say, "No, the green thing."

She presses it, the app comes up, she reads it, and asks, "What's a 'string' ?"

Typical demo.