Unsung heroes of the Nextcloud community: Biswajit Das developing a Nextcloud Bookmarks Android client

What is your favorite Nextcloud app? Over 12.000 Nextcloud instances have enabled the Bookmarks app to favorite their favorites!

Nextcloud Bookmarks

This app provides you with a web interface for collecting, organizing and sharing bookmarks to the sites on the web that are precious to you. You can browse and filter your bookmarks via tags, folders and by using the built-in search feature and you can share folders with other users and groups as well as create public links for them. Also, in order to access your bookmarks anywhere, it also allows you to synchronize with third-party clients via a built-in REST API, be it in your browsers or on your phone.

One of these third party clients is the Bookmark app for Android developed and mainteined by Biswajit Das. We asked him a few questions about his app!

Meet Biswajit

Biswajit is a UK based Cloud DevOps professional, passionate about Android Development and Cricket! He designs solutions for on premise to cloud migrations, while in his free time works on creating Android Apps, 5 of which are already on the Play store.

How it all started?

While browsing around about cloud security, Biswajit found some useful information about cloud security on the Nextcloud website and explored a bit beyond just that… He quickly ended up installing Nextcloud and started using Bookmarks as it seamed helpful and interesting. Then he decided to dedicate some time to better it, working with Christian, the initial developer of the app. In 2018 he took full responsibility of the app and continued to develop it on his own, spending quality time on the project.

Motivation and challenges

Time is a challenge! Biswajit was contributing to several open-source project, but at some point he could only dedicate his time to one project and decided to go for Nextcloud.

Privacy, having your data under control, open-source! These things are motivating me to invest my time contributing to Nextcloud.

His secret to keep up doing all the things he likes to do, is completing all officework within office hours, that leaves plenty of time if you oranize your day based on priority. This way Biswajit can spend time with his family and on his interests such as developing apps.

Initially it was a little challenging to understand the Nextcloud ecosystem as a new contributor however I am very comfortable now. The challenges I’ve faced in app developement have to do with implementing single sign-on and folder structure for Nextcloud Bookmarks

Bookmarks for Android features

The Bookmarks for Android app aims to cover everything the web app does, and integrate well in Android. A short feature overview:

• Single sign on (SSO)
• Multiple accounts 👥
• View Bookmarks offline 🔌
• Mark bookmarks as favorite
• Organize your bookmarks with labels 🔖
• Create, edit, share and delete Bookmarks 📝
• Manage tags 🏷
• Translated in many languages 🌎

You can get the app on on F-Droid or GooglePlay. You can find it also in our app store!

The future of Nextcloud and Bookmarks

I feel like Nextcloud is the next big thing!

Biswajit is aiming on maintaining more Android applications for Nextcloud apps and has been talking to Tobias Kaminsky and looking in some of the other apps. Let’s see what’s coming in the future!

And what’s next for Bookmarks?

• Stabilizing SSO
• Adding Themes
• Adding multiple language support
• User experience and better look

Make Bookmarks more awesome

Are you or will you use this app?

Of course, you can always contribute and help Biswajit perfect it by reporting issues or even solving them. Take a look at the project!

Develop your own app

Would you like to develop your own app for Nextcloud?

Here’s all you need to know about our developer program and here’s all information you need to get started.

If you have any question or suggestion, please join the discussion in our forums!