We are looking at a native android app for the functions that would most benefit from a mobile solution.  The internal architecture changes in v17 were the first stage in that direction.  We're now doing the initial work on splitting the code up into smaller chunks so that we can re-use the core functionality in a REST server to push the data back and forth to the android app.  Unfortunately I have no idea how long this is going to take, so I don't have any estimate of availability.