Proposal for Paid Android Plugin

[thesunny]

I’m considering a paid version of an Android plugin for Slate for about $500.
To add clarity

1. I made sure to message Ian first to make sure he’s okay with it

2. Building Android support is a lot of work. I would love to be able to contribute for free (like Ian!), but the cost is high for me to burden alone. I contributed Android Support for Slate 0.47 which was working although not perfect and that took 3 months. That doesn’t include research I did prior to starting or the devices I had to purchase to test on. The next version may take less time because of my experience but may take longer because of the changes to the API, the language change to Typescript and inexperience with 0.5x.

3. Expected price is $500 which includes one year of updates (license for the version you have is forever). That’s 5 hours of work at $100/hr (I’m paid higher but just for an idea of the value proposition).

4. As a safety net to purchasers, if I can’t support it properly, it would revert to open source.

5. It would be a separate plugin which means it would not be in the same repository as Slate.
   Background:

I spent three months working on the last version based on the prediction that the community would then take it over. Prior to that, Android support was the biggest Slate issue (in terms of comments) and had been unsolved with several failed attempts for about 2 years. I thought if I made the investment at that time, I could focus on my own project afterwards. It was a big investment for me.

However, Slate underwent a rewrite and Android support was dropped. Ian never promised to keep the API stable so no bad feelings (in fact I’m grateful for his contributions) and he’s been very clear about his parameters which do not include Android support as he doesn’t need it. The bottom line for me is that I have to rewrite Android support to get it working again and I wasn’t able to get the community to take it over so the investment didn’t pay off.

My instinct is if I add Android support again, it’s going to continue to need upkeep. It’s complicated because of the many workarounds to make Android work. It’s also not fun to work on because of the workarounds. The side effect is it makes it harder to get contributors for Android support. For me, I would prefer to pay somebody else $500 for an Android plugin that works so if you’d rather, I’ll be happy to be your client. But there doesn’t seem to be anybody offering at this time.

My question to you is would you be interested in a paid Android plugin?

As a measure of interest, please thumbs up if you are interested

[thesunny]

Also open for discussion in Slate's Slack #mobile channel.

Related to these open/recent issues on Android:

#3112
#3313
#3470
#3564

[DamareYoh]

Hey @thesunny , thanks for posting this. Android support is a major investment and requires a great deal of specialized domain knowledge. It makes sense to me to offer it as a licensed add on.

Wishing you luck!

[tim-soft]

Do you foresee a path to eventually open sourcing Android support?

[Nantris]

@thesunny thank you a million times for making 0.47 as great as it is.

Definitely, definitely interested in this idea. We're not up to 0.50.x and up yet, so only in the abstract for now. I absolutely think your value proposition makes sense though.

And to reiterate what @DamareYoh said, there's so much work just to understand how mobile keyboard composition works, and then how to make it work with Slate too. As someone who tried to follow along with @thesunny's work and help what little I could, I can attest to the enormous amount of work that it took. I can also attest that @thesunny is the person for the job.

A road to open sourcing it would be welcome, even if it was many years in the future. I'd envision a bare minimum of five years so that @thesunny could be adequately rewarded for his hard work. Ten years or never are both also fine.

I really hope this happens.

[pumanitro]

Do we have some list of "tasks" that needs to be done to fully support Android and iOS?

[santiagopuentep]

I think it would be better to see what resources are needed for the whole team to keep improving this until it becomes the best text editor framework out there. We currently use Quill because it supports Android, but we would rather use Slate if we are sure that we can invest in implementing it.

Have you though about some kind of Patreon, not only for Andoid but for all of Slate?

For background, we are a startup that's doing very well and at the center of our offer is a text editor that we will be improving throughout the years. We have plans to heavily on this type of project in the near future.

We would be interested in support development as long as it stays open source. It would be an investment for everyone to benefit from.

[jfurneaux]

@santiagopuentep Same here at Hive.

[thesunny]

@santiagopuentep @jfurneaux @slapbox

Here is a proposal for a sponsored Android Plugin that would be released to open source #3786

[wceolin]

As an update, @thesunny launched a Kickstarter campaign to make it open-source - as he explained on #3786. It would be awesome to have your support to make this happen, @santiagopuentep @jfurneaux @slapbox, and others following this issue.

[Nantris]

@wceolin thank you! Didn't realize I wasn't subscribed to that thread and I totally overlooked the updates. Just contributed, wish I could kick in more.

[thesunny]

Hi everyone, just as a way of a quick update, Wayne has begun work on the Android plugin and we should have an early preview of it in the next two weeks. This is a version of a Slate Android plugin that is still early and WILL have bugs and is designed for Android 10 only.

Our hope is to get it out there (a) for people who are desperate for any Android support and can put up with a few bugs and (b) a way to get some feedback and bug reports in.

As a reminder, the estimated delivery date for the plugin as per the Kickstarter is December 2020.

[thesunny]

Hi everyone,

We have an alpha version of a Slate Android Plugin available here:

https://github.com/wleroux/slate-android-plugin

It's not a final release by any means, but if you want to get started with it and report any issues not listed before, it could help us isolate bugs. It's posted under Wayne Leroux's GitHub account at the moment but may be moved in the future.

Notes about the alpha release:

• Requires the 0.59 version of Slate released a few days ago
• Only works on Android 10 (may work on Android 11)
• Continuous backspace has bugs
• Auto-Complete has bugs

Please post in #3786 if you have any issues