Native app integration like never before: The Foursquare for BlackBerry 10 SDK

Yesterday, BlackBerry announced their first BB10 devices. We here on the BlackBerry team at Foursquare are really excited about the launch and wanted to give our awesome third party developers something to help them get the most out of Foursquare and BlackBerry 10. With the help of the amazing Invocation Framework (learn more here) we have opened up a few parts of the Foursquare for BlackBerry 10 app to developers to enrich their native apps with Foursquare content easier than ever before. Check out the two examples below and then head over to GitHub to check out our sample app and get started.

Foursquare Single Sign On (SSO)
The first thing we’ve opened up, and a personal favorite, is the ability for your users to connect their Foursquare accounts with the click of a button. Instead of every app having to make their own WebView wrapper solution to the OAuth flow for obtaining an access token, we’ve built it right into the native Foursquare app for everyone to use. You can now let a user login to your app through Foursquare in 6 lines of code, and the user never has to leave the context of your app.

It is up to the user whether to approve or deny your app. We will send their action back to you, along with the access token if they decided to link their Foursquare account with your app.

Easy as that! So be sure to include a “connect with Foursquare” option in your app to reduce friction for new users signing up!

Foursquare Place Picker
More and more often the most engaging content that users can create comes with a location attached to it, whether that’s a picture posted on Instagram or a beer being checked into on Untappd. With the place picker api, you can build this rich content into your app built on the power of the over 50 million places in the Foursquare database. The best part about this is that just like the SSO api, you get the native Foursquare UI, network requests and GPS functionality built into your app without having to write any of it. Just use the invocation framework to launch it. If you know what your user is looking for already, you can pass in a query to prime the search with and if you have already authenticated a user, just pass in their token for personalize results!

Once a user selects a place, we’ll return back to you the JSON data for that place that you can process and then do whatever you need to do with it!

- Kyle, Foursquare BlackBerry Engineer