Foursquare Releases SDK for BlackBerry 10 Developers 0

Foursquare released a slick BlackBerry 10 app which they are working on adding more features to. One of the cool functionality enablers is the SDK that Foursquare has opened up to other developers on BlackBerry 10. This is the FIRST SDK that Foursquare has released and it opens up Foursquare to third party apps. The first feature they opened in single sign on which allows users to connect their Foursquare accounts with one click. That means you can now let a user login using their Foursquare account in 6 lines of code!!! They also opened up a place picker API that lets developers pull in data from foursquare for a location.

The SDK uses BlackBerry’s new Invocation framework to allow third-party apps to interact with Foursquare. It provides developers Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities for Foursquare users and a simple way to query Foursquare for nearby venues.

With SSO, users will be able to authorize an app to connect to their Foursquare accounts in much the same way Facebook does on other platforms. They won’t need to log in first, they’ll just tap “Allow” to connect. If you’ve connected more than a handful of apps to your Foursquare account before, you know what a benefit it is to skip the username and password.

Hundreds of apps — from Instagram to Untappd — already incorporate Foursquare venues. The new features included in the SDK will make that easier for other developers. By including a few lines of code, they’ll be able to use Foursquare’s native venue search features without having to write the GPS and API logic behind it.

These moves should prove a boon to BlackBerry developers. With Foursquare pre-installed on every phone, SSO with Foursquare could be almost a prolific as Facebook, while including a simple venue search SDK could make Foursquare the de facto standard for location information on BlackBerry 10 devices.


source:foursquare