Integrating Solid Project into Native Android Development

With the rapid growth of digital platforms, user privacy, security, and data ownership have become major concerns. The Solid project, introduced by Tim Berners-Lee, tackles these issues by separating data from applications, giving users full control over their personal information through Personal Online Data Stores (Pods). While Solid has been widely adopted in web development, integrating it into native Android applications presents several challenges due to lack of tools, and platform limitations. This thesis explores these challenges and provides a structured solution for making Solid work seamlessly within the Android ecosystem and providing libraries to Android developers to integrate their applications into Solid. The study begins by analyzing Solid’s architecture, and the lack of existing tools that properly support Solid integration. To address these issues, a new approach is introduced: a modular framework designed to bring Solid into the Android development workflow. The solution consists of three main components: • Solid Android API, which handles authentication (via OpenID Connect), resource management, and Data Modules. • Android Solid Services, a dedicated app which uses background service that acts as a central hub for authentication and data retrieval, reducing the complexity for third-party apps. • Solid Android Client, a lightweight library that developers can use to easily integrate Solid functionality into their applications without having to deal with low-level implementation details. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this solution, an address book application was developed as a practical use case. This app securely stores and manages address books information using Solid Pods, proving that Solid can be successfully integrated into native Android development while maintaining security, privacy, and interoperability. The evaluation of this approach highlights its benefits, such as improved user control over data and reduced reliance on centralized storage, but also reveals areas for improvement, including API optimizations, and performance enhancements for mobile environments. This research contributes to the broader effort of bringing Solid technologie to Android platform by providing a concrete, working solution in Android development. Future work includes refining the API for better usability, extending support for additional Solid features, and exploring new mobile applications that can benefit from Solid pods. By enabling seamless Solid integration in Android, this study lays the groundwork for a more privacy-focused and user-controlled mobile experience.