Today we are happy to announce the release of the ownCloud mobile libraries for iOS and Android. ownCloud is a free file sync and share solution. The main differentiator to Dropbox, Google Drive, and others beside being free software is that you can run it yourself wherever you want. Obviously a central place to you store your files is only useful if you can access it from all devices and integrate it with all of the applications that you use.
Because of that, the ownCloud strategy is to provide as many ways as possible to access files and data stored in ownCloud. We have a strong commitment to support open protocols and formats like WebDAV, CalDAV, CardDAV, OCS, ODF and others. So you can mount your ownCloud via WebDAV easily with KDE, GNOME, Windows, Mac and so on. It’s easy to integrate ownCloud with other systems by transferring files via WebDAV. This is the power of open protocols. But ownCloud provides much more than that. There are mobile applications for iOS and Android and Desktop syncing
clients that you can use to work with you files. The Desktop syncing clients runs on Mac, Windows and Linux and also ship with a command line client that can be used to automatically sync folders between desktops and the server or script it in any way. There is also a C++ library that can be used by 3rdparty clients like the KDE Plasma one. So there are a lot of options to access your ownCloud from the desktop.
On the phone and tablet side it was, until now, a bit more difficult. A user could use the official ownCloud apps, but if a 3rd party app wanted to access an ownCloud server, then the 3rd party app had to implement all of the WebDAV and REST calls needed to talk to ownCloud.
This is why today we released free libraries for iOS and Android that can be used used by mobile developers to add ownCloud support to their apps. They provide easy to use methods to read and write files, share files and many more useful operations. To make these libraries as useful as possible to as many developers as possible, we have released them under the MIT license.
The libraries can be download here
The documentation how to use them can be found here:
For any developer related questions please post to the new ownCloud developer list http://mailman.owncloud.org/mailman/listinfo/devel