Android

The Portal Go sits in my kitchen. It’s a 10-inch touchscreen with a decent microphone and camera, and out of the box it’s mostly a video-calling device I barely used. Meta’s stopped making them, but that doesn’t matter much here: the app I sideloaded onto it would run on pretty much any Android tablet. If you’re starting from scratch, a Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ or a Lenovo Tab M11 would do the same job — 10-11 inch screen, microphone, speaker, Wi-Fi. That’s the whole hardware requirement for the front end. ...

When you install an Android app from an APK, outside the Play Store, it never updates itself. The Play Store won’t touch it, the OS won’t check for new versions, and your users stay on whatever they installed until somebody tells them otherwise. I maintain a small app that’s distributed as a direct APK download. Every release meant messaging people to go and download it again. That stops being viable at about three users, so I built a basic over-the-air updater into the app. ...