Many EOS projects currently, such as:
ecurve.finance
owens.app
…and many others
provide first-class Anchor logins.
But since there is no way to use Anchor on android currently, it disables any mobile usage of these apps for android users.
What is stopping Anchor from being on Android? And is there a workaround to login to these apps on android that primarily support anchor logins.
How can we help anchor finally come to android?
Time and manpower are the hurdles that need to be overcome.
We spent almost a year building the iOS version of the app before finally releasing it, and started on the Android version near the end of that year cycle. Now we have been working on the Android version for about 10 months and are nearing the point where the base version is almost ready.
Our team is pretty small so we don’t have extra developers to speed things up at this point. The only thing that would increase the rate at which we could deliver solutions like Anchor is if we had a larger team.
Why not leverage volunteers from EOS community. I hope to help, need to find a way in.
Volunteer developers? Volunteers have been hard to come by. In the 2.5 years Anchor for Desktop has existed as an open source project, only a few contributions have been made to the project. We’re seeing the same thing with Scatter at the moment, with development slowing from the original devs and them trying to encourage the community to help pick it up. I haven’t seen much happen on that front.
It’d be nice if it were possible to get volunteers to help with this stuff - but most people would rather work on their own projects rather than the infrastructure of the chain like wallets, protocols, and SDKs.
Those are already in the past. There may be various reasons why a project is not attracting developers. EOS is attracting attention from public again now, this time it may be different.
I want to find a way to help the team. About 2 weeks ago, i tried to translate sentences in Anchor to Chinese, and you told me most of the sentences will be deleted soon, may be better to do that later.
I am a full stack developer, i hope to work for EOS related open source projects, especially infrastructure of the chain, you can assign me tasks directly.
Out of respect for your time, I didn’t want to see things translated only to get discarded. A large portion of what you see in desktop today is potentially going to removed or be unused as we shift towards an authenticator first model.
This change might not be “soon”, but it’s been something we have been working towards for a while now.
During our initial conversations I didn’t know this, and honestly I didn’t see you mention wanting to “find a way in” from your initial response - sorry for that. That’s awesome to hear though! The community needs more active developers tinkering with these things and building out solutions.
What is your existing skillset? Currently there’s a large chunk of the ecosystem written in Javascript which I’m sure could use support in various areas, Anchor and its SDKs included. Outside of Javascript there’s also plenty of opportunities, with many programming languages lacking the tools needed to support EOS/EOSIO. There is no shortage of work.
I have experience with javascript, and many backend related skills. I think i may try first on Anchor Desktop. How do we communicate about task details, is that ok if i simply choose tasks from github issues and make pull requests?
Where are you currently working?
Is there a way to help you? with testing or development on android?
What are you using? Java or Kotlin?
You are free to - but since Anchor is a wallet and trust in the application is paramount, you can expect all changes to be pretty heavily criticized. I would avoid any changes that update or install new dependencies since that will greatly increase the need for us to more deeply review the changes for security implications.
We have a backlog of improvements we’d like to make to the app, not all of which are filed as github issues as well, so feel free to let us know what you’d like to try and tackle and we’re happy to have discussions on that.
Maybe we can use these forums to coordinate community driven efforts?
We’ll have an open beta testing phase soon.
The app itself for Android is just being assembled with ReactNative at the moment. There is a huge lack of SDKs available for Java/Kotlin, so we decided to go the embedded webapp route in order to leverage code we had already written. If we were to write Anchor for Android in Java/Kotlin, we’d need a few libraries created from scratch, primarily one that mirrors:
I am not familiar with Anchor’s structure now, i need to start from some small tasks. You may assign me kind of tasks that can help me to get familiar with the whole project.
I have already made a pull requests, but it failed circle CI check, and reason seems not on my side.
I used to participate in open source communities, usually they use IRC or mailing list to communicate.
But currently seems there is only me as one volunteer, i think it is ok we choose a way to communicate directly.
Currently i am a freelancer, are you that ‘sihai’ i know?
Our team works out of slack primarily, we can pull you in as a single channel guest if you’d like as a better way to communicate with us.
I started talking with both @dafuga and @johan about a direction we might be able to start you off with. So far we’re just brainstorming ideas based off what our current goals are, but I figured I’d at least respond and make the offer of starting to use slack. I think I’d just need an email address to send the invite.
I agree, you can pull me in a slack channel, we can communicate task details then. You can find my email in my github page.
Invite sent to the address on your Github profile 
Are you in China or? I can discuss it
We can communicate well if you are in China