Google+ ANE, our first commercial product

We’re glad to introduce our first commercial product: an ANE for Google+!

We’re big fan of Milkman Games’ ANEs, especially the GoViral one. It enables to share a post on Facebook, Twitter, mail… everywhere? Not really. It’s missing Google+! Thanks to our ANE, you will be able to target the Google+ platform for iOS and Android.

Selling your own product
We’re used to get automatically new ANEs update via mail, it’s really useful. We wanted a system to handle that easily: once an update is done, just put a zip somewhere and all the customers should be able to access it. Also we didn’t want to manage each payement. Obviously we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel and had a look on the existing solutions :
BlueSnap
FastSpring
Gumroad

At first we thought to use BlueSnap, like many other small companies. But we found that thread, it sounds crazy. We directly avoid BlueSnap and start looking on smaller vendors. Gumroad sounds the most interesting, no complication for registration (unlike FastSpring), all the features we needed, and a small sales tax.

The Google+ ANE
Making an ANE for Google+ was terribly complicated, really. We already made several ANEs, but this one get me crazy, we ran into many issues : managing UIApplicationDelegate on iOS which isn’t easy at all, managing dx.jar, fighting with Android Google Play Services SDK version etc. Also the Google+ SDKs don’t have exactly the same behaviors between iOS and Android, we did our best to unify the API.

Then we had to write the documentations for this first version, at all it takes one month to do it on my spare time.

Public source code access
To have the ANE and the right to use it, you must buy a license. However the source code of this ANE is accessible to everyone. We learnt so much from the open source community and devoted people, that’s our way to give something back. People who bought the ANE will find instructions, examples, ANE, SWC, and the build files. So you can recompile the ANE if needed!
No annual fee. Pay once and you will get all the future update!

We plan to add more features from the Google+ SDK in the coming weeks… We hope you will enjoy this ANE!

4 thoughts on “Google+ ANE, our first commercial product

  1. Hooray! I recently developed an app and ran into this same exact problem! GoViral ONLY supports Facebook Login. And although it does have twitter support… its not for logging in either…. and just forget Google+

    I needed to Login/Login/Share with Facebook,Twitter, & Google+ , so I ended up jumping through hoops getting OAuth to work for Twitter & Google+ and relying on GoViral to cover facebook.

    Now that you guys did the Google+ part… the last task is for someone to make the ULTIMATE MEGA SOCIAL ANE… that provides Login to Facebook,Twitter,Google+ as well as Sharing on all 3 platforms.

  2. Hello,

    I bought this and it is working fine but can somebody explain why WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission is needed?

  3. Thanks for the feedback, Mihail.
    Unfortunately, for sharing an image on Android with the Google+ framework, it must be saved on disk. We can’t share a bitmap data directly. seStream takes an URL as an arguement.
    So in AIR we save the image, gives it to the ANE and when it’s done, the image saved is deleted.

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