App de Vida: a data sharing application for indigenous communities
App de Vida (life app) is a smartphone application for indigenous and other remote communities to access and share information offline.
Updated: June 16, 2020.
The functionality of App de Vida is simple, by design. There are three screens: a home screen, a language picker screen, and a screen with information.
The information screen can be populated with whatever information is relevant to share for a specific community. It could be as simple as instructions about avoiding the spread of COVID-19, documents from the Constitutional Court translated into multiple languages, or an entire plan de vida (life plan) with multiple chapters.
The content of the app may be translated into any language.
App de Vida is deployed and shared as an APK file, to enable communities in the most remote contexts to be able to share and access the application on their smartphones with limited or no internet connectivity. Community members can share the application in the form of the APK file with others using Bluetooth, or Whatsapp.
To customize the content, only some knowledge of HTML is needed, and it is possible to copy and paste the content of an existing build and modify the text/images. We are working on a technical Readme file, and a Github repository for the app. New features, improvements on the application's user interface, and a clear visual identity will be ticketed and built in over time.
App de Vida is an open-source application being developed by Native Land Digital, in stewardship with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT). If you have any questions about App de Vida, please get in touch.
App de Vida: COVID-19 demo (June 2020)
As a first pilot to demonstrate how App de Vida works, we built a version of the application with COVID-19 instructions (from ACT-Suriname and MZ) translated into seven different languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Sranantongo, Tarëno, and Wayana.
You can download this app and install it on your phone to see how it works.
Download the APK: http://amazonteam.org/appdevida/appDeVida-COVID-19.apk
Here is a link showing how to install the APK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHlj_Vm5Nn0
Here is a video showing how the app works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q97kLVKY96k
Download the code (GitHub repo in progress): http://amazonteam.org/appdevida/appDeVida-master-june2020.zip