The Android Developers Blog has just announced a new sample application called Photostream that will be added to the apps-for-android project that Google has going on. According to Romain Guy, “Photostream is a simple photos browser and viewer for Flickr. All you need to use it is a Flickr screen name or user name (the application offers a default user name if you just want to try it.)” Here are some of the features provided by Photostream which will entice developers more than us ordinary users:

• Activity aliases
• Adding custom shortcuts to Home
• Adding a new wallpaper chooser to the system
• Custom layouts
• Custom XML attributes
• Use of themes
• Use of styles
• Use of text colors
• Use of <include>
• Use of bitmap and layer drawables from XML
• Use of HttpClient
• Proper interaction between background threads and the UI thread
• Efficient display rotation (using the new onRetainNonConfigurationInstance() API)
• Animations and layout animations
• Cropping an image
• Image manipulation

Seems cool to me but unfortunately I’m not a Flickr fan.  But… since the source code of Photostream is available I hope some developers out there will use it to make an application stream photos from Picasa.