Building mobile applications for social good

“If you were thinking of designing or building a website, you’d be in luck. If you were thinking of writing a suite of financial management tools, you’d be in luck. If you were even thinking of creating the next big video game, you’d be in luck. Visit any good bookstore and the selection of self-help books and “how-to” guides leave you spoilt for choice. 

Unlike the plethora of self-help guides on the more established topics, if you were looking to do something with mobile phones you’d likely have mixed results. There are plenty of books available extolling the virtues of Java, Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, C++, Symbian, Android and just about any other development environment or platform out there. Combine that with the growing field of mobile UI (user interface) design and you’d think that pretty much everything was covered. But there is one thing missing, although you’d probably only notice if you’re one of a growing number of developers turning their attention to the developing world”.

I’m talking about a guide on “Building Mobile Applications for Social Good“. Although just a start, this article – written for The Testing Planet – in part aims to fill that gap. At conferences and seminars I often talk about our experiences developing FrontlineSMS, and the thinking and fieldwork behind it, but until now much of this wasn’t particularly well captured in written form in a single place.

A PDF of the “Building Mobile Applications for Social Good” article is available via the kiwanja website here [2 Mb]. A PDF of the full edition of this month’s Testing Planet is available on their website here.

The Testing Planet is a magazine produced by The Software Testing Club and its community members. The magazine is published in print, ebook, Kindle, PDF and web format. You can follow them on Twitter at @testingclub

Further reading
Check out an earlier article – “Mobile Design. Sans Frontieres” – co-written with friend and colleague Joel Selanikio, and the wider “Mobile apps development” category in this blog.

80 thoughts on “Building mobile applications for social good

  1. Pingback: Fr@nthro
  2. Pingback: Ken Banks
  3. Pingback: Justin Long
  4. Pingback: Joy Kendi
  5. Pingback: Mercy Deche
  6. Pingback: Spot A Cheetah
  7. Pingback: Robson Santos
  8. Pingback: Moses Sitati
  9. Pingback: changefeed
  10. Aleksei says:

    Hi Ken!

    IMHO You’d better write /Myth #1: “High-end is better than low-end”/ instead of just /“High-end is better than low-end”/ and so on, because these topics looks like lessons and statements, not myths =)

    — Kind regards, Aleksei

  11. Pingback: FrontlineSMS o/
  12. Pingback: Martin Tisne
  13. Pingback: paul albert
  14. Pingback: Mo James Apted
  15. Pingback: Martine Koopman
  16. Pingback: ICFJ Knight
  17. Pingback: in2mentalhealth
  18. Pingback: John Brugge
  19. Pingback: ICTDxCMU
  20. Pingback: Ananda Galappatti
  21. Pingback: CTIA Shows
  22. Pingback: Tony | IEDay News
  23. Pingback: Gamos
  24. Pingback: elogika IT
  25. Pingback: Rob Rubinoff
  26. Pingback: Koketso Moeti
  27. Pingback: Luis F. Solorzano
  28. Pingback: Kantideep Thota
  29. Pingback: Ken Banks
  30. Pingback: Muraya Kamau
  31. Pingback: Lukonga Lindunda
  32. Pingback: BongoHive
  33. Pingback: eDOT Geek
  34. Pingback: Emeka Azuka Okoye
  35. Pingback: Tom Marentette
  36. Pingback: Cybertheology
  37. Pingback: Philip Auerswald
  38. Pingback: socialedge
  39. Pingback: Chris O'Sullivan
  40. Pingback: New Media Project

Comments are closed.