Assembling the Android army: Organizing the chaos

The "Assembling the Android army" series of posts is where I provide completely unsolicited advice to Google and the Open Handset Alliance on strategies and tactics for growing the base of Android developers, to better cement Android's place in the mobile platform marketplace.

If you want developers to build on your platform, you have to make it easy for them to do so. Part of that is providing documentation and related information about how one builds applications for said platform. For the purposes of this post, I'll refer to this as "platform knowledge".

In a regular open source project, particularly one of any size, usually there is a myriad of ways for people in the community to contribute to the platform knowledge. Some might be very open, using wikis and the like. Some might be more controlled, but still have ways for people to contribute documentation to the project site (e.g., FAQs and answers). And almost all of them have some measure of outbound links to community-maintained resources, partly to steer platform newcomers to useful sources of platform knowledge, and partly as a "tip of the hat" to those in the community who build up such knowledge.

Indeed, with Android, there is a fair amount of material being written about how to write applications - a Google search on android (development OR programming) turns up some 8 million matches. These include blogs, discussion sites, tutorials, and whatnot.

And virtually none of these are linked to from the official Android development site.

In 2008, I discussed this issue with a Google engineer - the response was "they can search for it". By that argument, Wikipedia should not have been needed, since everything in Wikipedia exists elsewhere, typically online, courtesy of the "no original research" policy. The fact that Wikipedia is huge, gets a ton of traffic, and is insanely popular suggests that maybe, just maybe, there is value in organizing the chaos, not merely by search algorithms, but by hand.'

Furthermore, suppose somebody created an "Androidpedia" and, working with a community, built up a top-notch site for collecting platform knowledge about Android. Could such a site succeed if the official Android development site disavows all knowledge of its existence? After all, if the official Android development site is ignoring what has been written to date, what would convince the community that this policy will ever change?

This is not to say that the official Android development site lacks any community-generated platform knowledge. It does host, or at least point to, the Android Google Groups, which are very useful resources for questions and answers. However, discussion groups make for lousy knowledge repositories - it's like saying we don't need history books of the 20th Century because anyone who wants to know what happened can just read a century's worth of issues of the New York Times. Discussion groups are great for focused interactions on a topic, but finding existing answers in a sea of discussion posts is not exactly easy.

Once again, the Android army is in need of a catalyst only Google and OHA can really provide. In this case, the catalyst is as trivial as one can imagine: a handful of links from the official Android development site to community-based resources. How difficult can that possibly be?

• Wireless / Mobile
• Android
• android development
• android programming