What are the best practices to design webservices for mobile (particularly Android) apps?

Question

What are the best practices to design webservices for mobile (particularly Android) apps? Personally I'm focused on using JSON (and not XML) and I try to make it the less verbose I can. But I'm probably missing a lot of things.

Answer 1

XML parsing on Android is supposed to be faster than the built-in JSON parser as the former is backed by native code. However, some people have used a different JSON parser (http://jackson.codehaus.org/) with success.

Answer 2

The stuff I've read so far indicates that there is too much of a processing overhead when calling a traditional webservice using SOAP and parsing xml. The best advice was to make your webservice RESTful and use JSON. There's some good information on this earlier question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/297586/how-to-call-web-service-with-android

Answer 3

The GSON parser also works well with Android in my experience. Given that a shot if you're sending / received JSON payloads.