Congress: There’s An (Android) App For That

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Our Android app, “Congress”, is now published in the Android Market, for free. As I said in the beta release post, Congress is a pocket Congressional directory that takes full advantage of the Sunlight Labs Congress API and the Drumbone API. You can install it by visiting the Market, or scan the QR code in this post to take you right there.

The features:

  • Read the latest bills, laws, and see what bills were recently voted on.
  • Find members of Congress by using your phone’s location, a zipcode, a last name, or a state.
  • Read tweets and watch videos from members’ Twitter and YouTube accounts.
  • Reply to a member of Congress on Twitter from within the app, using your own account.
  • Read the latest news about them, using the Yahoo News API.

The app’s featureset is currently fairly minimal, but it serves as a foundation for bringing in a great deal of information about Congress. I hope to continue growing it to include voting history, real-time floor activity, and documents surrounding legislation.

The app’s code is open source, hosted on Github. There aren’t a ton of open-source Android apps out there, so I hope it’s of some use to any beginning Android developers out there dealing with the learning curve. You can also report any bugs or feature requests there, as we’re using Github for issue tracking. As always, we welcome feedback on how useful you find the app, and what you’d like to see.