Office 365 Android SDK ready for eager developers to tinker with

Microsoft’s being extra generous today and is offering the Office 365 Android SDK, for free. Users can download it directly from GitHub, as announced today by Microsoft from its SharePoint conference. With the Office 365 SDK, developers can integrate Office functionality into any Android app, provided they have the requisite SharePoint programming chops.

There’s a blog post to get developers started with, which suggests a few cool ideas such as placing an interactive quiz inside a polling app, and using SharePoint data to sync document across myriad apps. In order to run the SDK, users will need Android 4.0.3 says Android Police.

Office 365 is built on open standards, so that’s HTML5, REST web services, and OAuth compatibility. Apps can also be built with “your choice” of development tools, with Microsoft listing Ruby, C, .NET, Java, Python, PHP as examples. Microsoft has also made it “much easier” to share apps within a document. When we receive a document with a shared app, it’s one-click to activate it in other documents.

For everyone who wants to get developing, the SDK is free and ready for download today. This, along with a rumoured free version of Windows 8.1 is seemingly how Microsoft wants to give back to its community, or become Google as Wired puts it. Our hope: that the full Office suite quickly makes its way to Android tablets.