New Khan Academy mobile apps, including first official Android app • Hacker News Board

Re: New Khan Academy mobile apps, including first official Android app

#21

Post by IanCal » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 3:12 PM UTC

Not actually related to the android app, but I was a bit confused as to what this would be other than just a video player. I hadn't seen the Khan Academy since it was a collection of maths videos. Wow. I've been playing with the coding tutorials, and it's incredible. My wife has been learning with codeacademy but the tutorials there are oddly restrictive in what they allow, and have a bunch of problems with code that should (but doesn't) or code that doesn't (but should) work.

Listening to someone explain their code, being able to pause it and modify the code and see the changes immediately (and helpful error messages if you bork it) then hitting play and having it go back to a sensible state is incredible.

Re: New Khan Academy mobile apps, including first official Android app

#22

Post by alangpierce » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 4:44 PM UTC

androidpermissi wrote: post #19

alangpierce wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I worked on the Android app.) No, we're not using React Native yet, but we're hoping to start using it in the near future.

Okay, I got to ask. Why do you need permissions for identity and call logs. I still installed it, because you guys are awesome, but those permissions don't seem necessary. Obviously, I could be (and probably am) wrong.

Thanks for calling that out, it looks like the "read phone status and identity" permission is actually there by accident. (Still, I think it doesn't provide access to call logs, but I might be missing something.) We never specify it in our manifest, and none of our libraries do, but it looks like it's getting automatically added for compatibility reasons because one of our libraries has a low target SDK version. I'm fairly sure we never use that permission. I'll file a bug and we can probably can probably find a workaround to get that permission removed in a future release.

All of the other permissions are explicitly in our manifest and correspond to actual features of the app.

Re: New Khan Academy mobile apps, including first official Android app

#23

Post by matchu » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 5:01 PM UTC

WhitneyLand wrote: post #14

What possible reason is there not to open the source for these apps? There could be so many contributions and innovations from people who want to help with the code.

One reason is that managing an open-source community requires a huge investment in communication.

If you're not in a position to run a community, it makes sense to avoid doing things that suggest otherwise. People will ask questions and be upset when you don't have time to answer, they'll submit pull requests that you don't have time to properly review, etc.

Re: New Khan Academy mobile apps, including first official Android app

#24

Post by WhitneyLand » Wed, Sep 23, 2015, 6:08 PM UTC

matchu wrote: post #23

WhitneyLand wrote: post #14

What possible reason is there not to open the source for these apps? There could be so many contributions and innovations from people who want to help with the code.

One reason is that managing an open-source community requires a huge investment in communication. If you're not in a position to run a community, it makes sense to avoid doing things that suggest otherwise. People will ask questions and be upset when you don't have time to answer, they'll submit pull requests that you don't have time to properly review, etc.

I see what you're saying but they are hiring full time devs to work on these apps so it's not like a side/night project that's tough to get time for.

I believe it's really a lost opportunity and I've asked them about it but received no response.