I’m working on an Android app that needs to fetch data from a Google Sheets document. The spreadsheet contains two different worksheets, and I want to display the content from each worksheet in separate activity screens within my app.
I’m not sure what’s the best approach to accomplish this task. During my research, I came across a library called jxl.jar but I’m wondering if this is the right tool for the job.
What are the necessary components and steps needed to integrate Google Sheets data into an Android application? Are there any specific APIs or libraries that work better for this purpose?
I did this about a year ago - skip the direct API route and use Google Apps Script instead. Set up a web app script as middleware between your Android app and the sheets. Way easier than dealing with authentication nightmares, and you can make it publicly accessible or just use simple token auth. The script spits out clean JSON for each worksheet. Then your Android app just makes HTTP requests with OkHttp or Retrofit. Worked great for me with ~500 rows per sheet. Much simpler to deploy and maintain than wrestling with OAuth flows in the mobile app. Just don’t forget error handling - network calls love to fail at the worst times.
I’ve used Google Sheets integration in several Android projects. The Google Sheets API v4 through Google Cloud Console is definitely your best bet. That jxl.jar library you mentioned only reads local Excel files - it won’t work for remote Google Sheets.
You’ll need authentication first - OAuth 2.0 for user sheets or a service account for app data. The API client library does most of the work once you get credentials set up. Watch out for API quotas and add proper caching. You don’t want to hit the API every time someone opens an activity.
For two worksheets, just specify the sheet range in your API calls - sheet name plus cell range. The JSON response is pretty easy to parse into your Android views.
yeah, totally! the sheets api is really useful but you gotta get the permissions right first. enable it in google cloud - that’s the main thing. the docs mention retrofit or volley make json handling way easier. and jxl definitely isn’t meant for online use.