We're launching a little side-project today. It's an app for Android phones that lets you read The Guardian, anywhere. We've imaginatively called it "Guardian Anywhere".

It's designed to meet a simple use case: you want the news on your phone to read on your commute into work. You can tell the app to download your newspaper whenever you like, perhaps early in the morning before you wake up. You can also tell it to only grab the news over Wi-fi; there's a surprising amount of stuff in the Guardian each day, and we don't want you running your battery down grabbing it all over 3G.

Once it's downloaded, the content lives on your phone - perfect if you're travelling on the tube or through some of the more radio-challenged parts of the countryside (like, coincidentally, the Brighton-to-London line). As well as news stories, you get a pile of photographic imagery which the Guardian publishes every day. We've also tried to retain a little bit of the Guardian look and feel throughout, though this isn't an official Guardian product.

If you play with it a while, you'll discover a few other nifty features tucked away, like:

• Saving some of the fine photography to your phone as wallpapers;
• Choosing which sections of the paper to subscribe to (or which to avoid);
• Clipping articles or photos into a "Saved Articles" folder, to help you skim for interesting stuff and then peruse it at your leisure;
• Browsing through articles by section, author or tag. This makes it easy to find, say, all the articles in todays paper relating to executive pay and bonuses; and if you're really interested in a tag (or author), you can subscribe to it;

Guardian Anywhere is the brainchild of James Hugman, who kicked the project off during his gold card time and has been demonstrating it to us ever since at our fortnightly reviews. We've been testing and revising the app internally, and launched it onto the Android Marketplace after putting it in for the Android Developer Challenge.

All feedback is, as always, warmly welcome - please do try the app out and leave us some comments in the Market. The little 2D barcode you can see to the right of this paragraph is quite handy for getting hold of the app. Scan it with the barcode scanner on your Android phone to be taken to the right place in the Android Market, click the link if you're reading this with an Android phone, or just search the Market for "Guardian".

Comments

[DroidZine]

Brilliant application! We' were very impressed with the number of functionalities it offers and the way that content is made available on the device itself. The image-gallery was a complete knock-down for us.

BTW. We noticed a small bug. When reading an article with image(s), quick-press on the image brings up the context menu, but a long press crashes the article reading and brings you back to the article list. [We used HTC Magic]...

Best of luck on ADC2!

[twitter.com/Alfie]

Fantastic work Tom and James! /downloaded/. Definitely the best major UK news app I've yet used on Android.

[twitter.com/Briantist]

Thanks Tom, very good work.

[twitter.com/adriana872]

Excellent. Love the QR code, cute. :) Downloaded, about to test it on a bus. Thanks!

[Itay Maman]

I followed your "Gold Card" link and read about it. It is an excellent idea that every team should adopt!

[Peter]

Great app, but could you add the option to only download certain sections to save time?

[Elliot]

Lol, i had to laugh... I started out my OTA09 experience with your "Climbing the Mobile Mountain" session (good stuff!) - happy to finally be able to meet the famous Mr. Hume, went on to finish up the conference winning a (much unexpected) HTC Hero, which i promptly started using on Sunday and the first app i saw was a Guardian Anywhere. This is great because in the week since i got my first android (Magic) a week ago, the guardian mobi site has been my #1 companion on the commute to work. And on the final bus home having installed Twidroid, i came across a tweet linking to this blog, and now i find out who was involved in making Guardian Anywhere, bringing us neatly full circle!

Really like the app, but I'd say it has one glaring omission: no guardian comment section! Is this a conscious decision to leave some things exclusive to the guardian website, or simply an oversight? If it's the latter, i'd be the first to vote for including that in the app.

So, great meeting you, and thanks for bringing my favourite news source and my new favourite mobile experience to such a happy union! Hope to see you at a conference again sometime! ;-)

-Elliot

[Tom Hume]

Elliot - glad you liked the app :) It currently gets all its content through the Guardian RSS feeds, which don't include comments I'm afraid - so there's no plan to add them in right now.

The app itself is unofficial and independent of the Guardian, so this hasn't been driven by a desire to keep some content exclusive.

[Bala]

Fantastic, great app. Crowded tube journeys no longer a problem. Good bye Metro.

Thanks a ton

Bala

[Nick]

Bah! Not available on my shiny new HTC Tattoo because the screen is too small. Is there anything that can be done? I was becoming slightly dependant on this app so it's a shame I can't see it in the market anymore.

Nick

[stuart riddell]

am loving this app,but could you tell us how large in data sizes the daily update is,gotta keep a grip on my internet downloads dontcha know,thanks again

[Tom Hume]

Stuart

While the RSS feeds are uncompressed they are coming down at 100-300K each (for the text ones). These are downloaded each time - we need to do this because stories in them change quite frequently.

We cache images as much as we can - so they're only downloaded once. Each image is about 50-60k, plus 10k for a thumbail. For an initial download, you need 18 feeds and about 1000 images.

Tom

[florian]

Great application indeed! The only are of improvement could be to have more fresh news when downloading the news; some times they're 1 day ago. anyway it's a good stard!
Florian

[Brett]

Amazing App, can't live without it!!! my problem is I go back and fourth between my T-Mobile G1 (android) and my Unlocked iPhone. can you please put the app out for the iPhone??
Thanks,
Brett

[Paul Brannan]

Hi,

this looks great, but I don't seem to be able to switch between stories being stuck with the one displayed on the widget only. Help please.

[Bob]

This app looks great, thank you. But the Comment section is my favourite part........
Have you seen Calibre for ebooks? That can get the comment section.

Thanks anyway.

[Ralph Averbuch]

Tom

Your app stopped working for me, so I uninstalled and reinstalled -- same thing. When I click on an article the built-in viewer shows a blank - despite apparently downloading images etc. I can still opt to click through to the browser version but does kind of make offline an impossibility now.

Am I the first to get this or is it something much wider? Has the Guardian changed something on the server side to disable your app?

I'm using an HTC Hero on Vodafone in case that's any help.

Cheers

Ralph

[Ben]

Brilliant App, my only gripe is when set to "download over WiFi only", in order to spare my monthly 3G data allowance, if the WiFi signal drops out, it just gives up permanently, or doesn't even start. Can you please set it to re-try every few mins to download over WiFi until it manages it? Thanks

[pwc101]

I often find that I've forgotten to plug in my phone charger before going to sleep. Since I've set Guardian Anywhere to download the news over WiFi only, and to do it at 6am, I often find that in the morning, I've got almost no battery left. What would be nice would be an option to specify that the download should start only if the battery charge remaining is above some threshold value (25%, or thereabouts). Ideally, if this value could be specified, that'd be great.

Otherwise, thanks for the really great application. It's more useful than I could have imagined.

[Scott]

Seems to massively drain my battery when I'm browsing the content after its downloaded? (htc desire)

[C0d3x42]

I've been using this wonderful app on a HTC desire for a while and its been great. Have recently switched to a Samsung galaxy s and it now takes 90 mins to download and takes a significant chunk of the battery with it. Don't know if its the app or the phones os.
If i can be of any help in diagnosing it please twit me. Would love to see GuardianAnywhere really shine on the i9000 :-)

[niko]

Great app, but could you add the option to only download certain sections to save time? http://www.hotfilemediafire.com