Developing and releasing the Khan Academy Firefox OS app

I’m happy to announce that the Khan Academy Firefox OS app is now available in the Firefox Marketplace!

Khan Academy’s mission is to provide a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. The goal of the Firefox OS app is to help with the “anyone anywhere” part of the KA mission.

Why?

There’s something exciting about being able to hold a world class education in your pocket for the cheap price of a Firefox OS phone. Firefox OS devices are mostly deployed in countries where the cost of an iPhone or Android based smart phone is out of reach for most people.

The app enables developing countries, lower income families, and anyone else to take advantage of the Khan Academy content. A persistent internet connection is not required.

What’s that…. you say you want another use case? Well OK, here goes: A parent wanting each of their kids to have access to Khan Academy at the same time could be very expensive in device costs. Not anymore.

Screenshots!

App features

• Access to the full library of Khan Academy videos and articles.
• Search for videos and articles.
• Ability to sign into your account for:
  • Profile access.
  • Earning points for watching videos.
  • Continuing where you left off from previous partial video watches, even if that was on the live site.
  • Partial and full completion status of videos and articles.
• Downloading videos, articles, or entire topics for later use.
• Sharing functionality.
• Significant effort was put in, to minify topic tree sizes for minimal memory use and faster loading.
• Scrolling transcripts for videos as you watch.
• The UI is highly influenced by the first generation iPhone app.

Development statistics

• 340 commits
• 4 months of consecutive commits with at least 1 commit per day
• 30 minutes - 2 hours per day max

Technologies used

Technologies used to develop the app include:

• The Khan Academy API
• React
• Backbone
• Web APIs

Localization

The app is fully localized for English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish, and will use those locales automatically depending on the system locale. The content (videos, articles, subtitles) that the app hosts will also automatically change.

I was lucky enough to have several amazing and kind translators for the app volunteer their time.

• Rodrigo Silveira - Portuguese app translation
• Romain Sertelon - French app translation
• Pablo Solares Acebal - Spanish translation

The translations are hosted and managed on Transifex.

Want to contribute?

The Khan Academy Firefox OS app source is hosted in one of my github repositories and periodically mirrored on the Khan Academy github page.

If you’d like to contribute there’s a lot of future tasks posted as issues on github.

Current minimum system requirements

• Around 8MB of space.
• 512 MB of RAM

Low memory devices

By default, apps on the Firefox marketplace are only served to devices with at least 500MB of RAM. To get them on 256MB devices, you need to do a low memory review.

One of the major enhancements I’d like to add next, is to add an option to use the YouTube player instead of HTML5 video. This may use less memory and may be a way onto 256MB devices.

How about exercises?

They’re coming in a future release.

Getting preinstalled on devices

It’s possible to request to get pre-installed on devices and I’ll be looking into that in the near future after getting some more initial feedback.

Projects like Matchstick also seem like a great opportunity for this app.