Android/Gecko

Always more people use smartphones as medium for their digital life. This is especially the case in emerging countries which are targeted by Kiwix. We think Android will be the most important mobile platform in the next years, especially for the cheapest devices. Android is in addition, to the opposite of the Apple app. store, open to free softwares. Consequently our next big step, is to port Kiwix to Android.

We do not want to start an other software which would generate a lot of additional code to develop and maintain. So, current Kiwix code base has to be reused and ported. Kiwix runs currently with the help of Xulrunner, but it can also runs perfectly using Firefox. Firefox can since version 3 is able to launch third party software, like Kiwix. Fennec, Firefox for mobiles, was launched a few month ago for Android, so we hope that Kiwix could be ported to Android using Fennec or something similar (see this example).

We need for this task someone with good knowledges in C++, compilation and with know-how in porting C++ softwares to Android. Someone with enough motivation to build a prototype of XUL (with custom C++ XPCOM components) application running on Android could also match the requirements.