An Android application for receiving notifications of astrophysical transient events

Abstract We describe an application written for the Android platform for receiving real-time notifications of astrophysical transient events. The key feature of our application is the use of message oriented middleware as a message broker, with the messages in VOEvent format. We describe the design features and implementation details of our application. In particular, it was necessary to implement support for the Simple Text Oriented Messaging Protocol (STOMP) to allow communication with the broker. Our application is designed around VOEvent alerts from the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) project, but could easily be adapted for other surveys that issue VOEvent notices of astrophysical transients.