With the launch of Android and the possible major rival to the iPhone it is time to review how to make our sites more Android friendly. Although Android does not have millions of phones sold yet one major difference between iPhone and Android is that application development is easier on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux) and the ability to get new applications is not dependant on a controlled iTunes store.

Redirect Android users to a Separate Site

If you want to push Android users to another folder where you can then develop a more Android friendly design add the following to your .htaccess…

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} *.Android.*
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ Android/index.html

Site Width
The maximum pixel width of the Android screen is 320. If your site is currently optimized for a higher resolution then I suggest doing a redesign to make it fit in the 320 width. If you have an iPhone Friendly site already then adding a redirect would be a good solution.

Android Theme for your Blog

Although there is not a specific theme made for the Android you can install the iWPhone theme and plugin. Which works for the iPhone. Then in a text editor you can edit the iwphone.php to add android to it. Look for this code…

$useragents = array (“iPhone”,”iPod”);

Replace it with this…

 $useragents = array (“iPhone”,”iPod”,”Android”);

If your using WPtouch on your blog instead you should look for this code in your wptouch.php file…

$useragents = array(“iPhone”, “iPod”, “Aspen”);

Replace it with this…

$useragents = array(“iPhone”, “iPod”, “Aspen”,”Android”);

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.