That’s a big problem. According to GSMA’s The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity report, mobile devices are the primary, often the only, way people access the internet in low- and middle-income countries. In much of the world, the phone in someone’s pocket is the only computer they have. As a result, hundreds of millions of potential developers have been locked out of Android development because the tooling assumed a second device they just don’t have.
This is the same way we developed software in the late 1970s at my first post-college startup, Daisy Systems. It was a horrible process then and it hasn’t improved with age.
With Code on the Go (CoGo™), we eliminated the second computer. CoGo runs on your Android phone. That’s all you need: the computer you already have.
A little history, if you please.
The Daisy Logician was an engineering workstation, what would now be called a personal computer.
It cost $75,000 in 1982 (about $250,000 now). It was for electronic circuit designers, which is why the screen in the picture above shows a circuit diagram. We couldn’t develop the Logician software on the Logician. The needed tools ran only on an Intel Microprocessor Development System computer, which looked like this:
The Intel machines were expensive so we had only a few of them. You would sign up for time, or come in very early or stay very late. Each time you wanted to test a change, you would build the software on the Intel box, then download to a Logician test computer. Downloading was sluggish and failed often, so a lot of “development time” went into debugging communications problems between them, rather than working on the actual code.
Because we were software engineers, not electronic circuit designers, we didn’t know much about the target environment. We knew that our Logician software crashed a lot and wasn’t easy to use. But beyond that, we had little insight. Our time was mostly on the Intel boxes, not on our product.
As a result, our product wasn’t getting better or more reliable, only more complicated.
Eventually, a bright young engineer ported the entire toolchain from Intel’s CP/M-like operating system to the Logician’s UNIX-like operating system. We no longer had to battle communications problems or the difficulty of working in two different operating systems. Instead, we could do everything on the Logician. The computer lab with the Intel boxes suddenly became a wasteland. No one entered except to use the printer or nap under a table. Instead, we each had a Logician in our office. (Yes, that’s how old this story is. We had offices with doors and walls and landline phones on desks. If you made it past the Tyrannosaurus Rexes roaming outside, it was a sweet life. Until they learned how to grab doorknobs with their little hands.)
Why tell you this ancient-times story? Because that’s how Android apps are developed now, before Code On the Go. You build on a laptop on Windows, OS X, or Linux, then test on a phone with Android. Back and forth, switching environments and battling communications problems. It’s awful. It’s not remotely fun.
CoGo makes life simpler. Everything you need is in one place. It’s simple and reliable. Fast, easy, and fun. And for the developer anywhere in the world whose phone is their only computer, it’s the difference between being a developer and not being one. Try it. You’ll like it, or your money back (reminder: it’s free).
The doorknob is rattling. Even the Tyrannosaurs have figured out that the tools you carry beat the ones you left at the office. I must go now. Happy coding!
