Monday, August 22, 2011

Army moves to create mobile apps in pilot course

An increase in the commercial use of Smartphone technologies is rapidly finding its way into the military. For the past two years, the U. S. Army Training and Doctrine Command has pursued a concept exploration pilot program called Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications. In the consumer market, the proliferation of phones and accessibility for developers to write and distribute powerful apps has created an environment that has challenged traditional software acquisition strategies. The reduced requirements for developers have empowered scores of programmers to learn to write apps.

The Army, through CSDA, is working toward creating mechanisms that will allow organizations to write their own apps for distribution through a future Army Marketplace. Part of the CSDA process is teaching government civilians and members of active duty and reserves the foundations of writing mobile apps. The U. S. Army Signal Center of Excellence established a Mobile Applications Branch at Fort Gordon, Ga., with a task to develop apps and host training opportunities for app development.

From 8-19 August, Fort Gordon hosted an Android class in Cobb Hall, which consisted of 38 students from TRADOC, quite a few came from other organizations within the Army and other services, who wrote their first Android apps within the course.

Read more here.

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