New Khan Academy mobile apps, including first official Android app | Hacker News Reader

New Khan Academy mobile apps, including first official Android app

khanacademy.org

97 pointsbeekay23 comments

Any idea if the source will be posted online on their github https://github.com/Khan ?

Khanacademy is a non-profit but when it comes to licensing they are closer to for-profit business licenses in that don't allow commercial derivative like wikipedia does. I love what they do though.

To be fair they may be non-profit but they still need to be able to sustain themselves financially, which means they need to operate on a commercial basis.

It's amazing to see how far Khan Academy has evolved over the past few years from it's days as a simple gallery of YouTube links. I also think Khan Academy is a great example of the importance of structure and organization in learning. You could probably find all of the same material scattered all over the web, including the KA videos themselves, but the structure, tracking and assessments add immense value to the material.

Glad to see Khan Academy supporting Android! This is definitely the better way to reach the majority of the world at the moment.

Would really love to see AndroidTV / AppleTV apps too!

This is amazing. I blame the successful completion of my classes in post secondary and high school thanks to Khan Academy. In retrospect, I could've done better by staying at home watching khan academy and using mooc and open source than going to most of my classes.

School does kinda resemble prison [1].

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

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.

How will the mobile app enhance the delivery of education that the mobile website won't?

[edit: thank you for all the replies!]

it works offline.

In terms of reach, a native app seems like a pretty big win. KA are aiming for global reach, and, in countries like India where tons of folks are running on old devices, any bandwidth or performance upgrade is significant.

Native apps save bandwidth on each request by relying on the API, which primarily transmits semantic data rather than presentational data. On a slow, metered connection, that's significant.

And, once the exercise framework lands on Android, it oughta have way better performance than the current Javascript implementation that the mobile website uses - especially for manipulating those fancy graphs. When users are frustrated by KA's unresponsiveness, they drop off and don't learn.

That said, the current Android app is definitely just a starting point; until exercises and all the personalized learning features land, mobile web will still be the best tool for KA's non-casual mobile users.

without using it or even looking at it: if they made a native app, the interface will be faster out of the box.

Giving a look at the content and length of videos, this also looks like a great way to consume educational content while on the way to work (On the train, of course. Not driving! :))

I haven't tried the Android app, but on an iPad the app experience vs the web-experience is like night and day for doing math problems.

You can easily draw your calculations anywhere on the screen, and when entering final results, you handwrite it, making square roots and fractions so much easier.

It is much more fun to do math problems on the iPad app than any other way I've tried.

Anyone know if they're using React Native for this?

(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.

Because Android permission model is junk and at least it's getting a rethink in M. Which will be relevant sometime in 2016 on part of Android device base but at least it's something. Honestly, if someone would be paranoid and wouldn't install apps based on those permissions, you'd be left with the stock phone.

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.

Funny to realize I had the urge to have an Android app for Khan Academy just today, took the time to search and got into their Tester program, used it the whole day and now I've found they just released it officially.

That's great news, they've been doing a really awesome job evolving their business and it's great to see now they are expanding even more, an Android app was really something they've been missing for a long time.

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.

> What possible reason is there not to open the source for these apps?

They don't own the right to distribute all the source for the apps? (I mean, it's possible.)

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.

Any way to share content between devices? Or have a central repository of content on a LAN that you can download to your device? An Android app with content sharing could enable a great offline Khan Academy experience in places without high-speed internet.

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