If your company is evaluating CRM solutions — and Android devices have been highly adopted among your mobile users — it’s worth taking a close at each of the major vendors’ current Android CRM support as well as their future plans for Android™ support.

In general, it appears that CRM vendors were caught off guard and are currently playing catch-up with the explosive growth that Android has experienced over the last couple of years. Because it’s early in the game, Android CRM applications that are listed on the Android Market are currently receiving less than stellar user reviews.

Android CRM Options for Popular Solutions

Salesforce

Salesforce.com’s approach to mobile device support has been to build mobile apps that run locally on mobile devices. Currently, Salesforce.com directly provides mobile support for iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows mobile.

Salesforce.com’s initial, Android CRM development efforts were focused on an Android Chatter client and does not yet offer its own Android CRM client. However, Salesforce.com has announced touch.salesforce.com which will work across all devices, including Android.

A currently available Android CRM solution for Salesforce has been developed by Seesmic (currently in beta) and it’s called SeesmicCRM for Salesforce.

Sage CRM

Sage recently announced the beta version of Sage CRM for Android. Rather than being a local Android app, this is a solution for making Sage CRM render in a very useful way within the browser on an Android device.

Sage takes a per device approach to mobile support. Similar to the Android CRM solution, Sage separately released Sage CRM for iPhone last year.

The pro to the browser-based approach is that no data synchronization is required and there’s no local app to maintain. The con is that a live Internet connection is required.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 takes a “one size fits all” approach to mobile browser support. Mobile Express for Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a simplified, browser independent version of the Dynamics CRM application. However, the UI is not shaped for any specific platform, such as Android or iPhone.

An Android CRM application is offered by BFI mobile on the Android Market.

SugarCRM

SugarCRM seems to be the only major CRM vendor that has released an internally developed Android CRM app. Sugar Mobile is available on the Android Market, but is far from hitting it out of the park in the User Reviews section.

Conclusion About Android CRM Solutions

Currently, none of the four CRM vendors or third party developers mentioned above, has both a released version and a highly rated, released version. However, these vendors will likely feel pressure to accelerate the development of their offerings in order to satisfy customer demands for mobile, Android CRM.