Android - poster child project

Question

In my past programming experience I found that learning by example is the shortest way to improve my skills. I'm now looking for a "poster child" opensource Android project which would follow best practices such as having good unit-test coverage, following clear design patterns, have well written, well documented sources and (hopefully) documentation. Another must - it should use ContentProvider and SQLite to store data. I'm not looking for the academia/book snippets - I really like to analyze and learn from a "real life" project, preferably available at Android Market with a good (min 4 stars) score Does such a beast even exist? I would really appreciate your suggestions and promise to pick the winner carefully.

I would really appreciate some quality feedback beyond quick Google search. I'm really looking for the "insider" opinion of someone who's been exposed to the project and who can recommend and maybe highlight/identify the project's strong and weak points.

Answer 1

I have some of my own ideas, but I'm looking to do the same as you so I'm not sure I wanna share. :-)

Probably the best thing to do is play a bit with your phone, then start thinking about what you would like to do on it. For example, perhaps you'd like to find a way to open your garage door with it. Or perhaps you'd like to port Planet M.U.L.E. to it? Or perhaps play a nice game of Empire with a phone-optimized interface?

Really it has to be something that tickles your fancy, or you won't be interested enough to keep plugging at it.

Answer 2

I learned a lot from http://code.google.com/p/shelves/

Not sure if it meets all points, but it is worth a look. Well organized, very clean code, maybe not that well documented, but... well, it is really a good example.

Answer 3

Since "Shelves" gets a bit dated I discovered new "poster child" Android project. It's K-9 email. It's large, complex, and very much worth studying. The only conspicuous omission: there is no test project.