Hi T-R@DJI

Thanks for asking the question - the short answer is yes, www.plantvillage.com can be used on any Android phone, and indeed on any smartphone with a modern browser. What we currently don't have is a native version for Android.

I want to provide a bit of background information because I think the question will come up again and again, which is good. I also want to share our vision - where we see PlantVillage going in the future.

PlantVillage is a repository of free, open access knowledge about growing food (edible plants). It currently has two legs - the Q & A, which you and I are participating in right now, and a library section, where we gather established knowledge about the plants, and in particular also about their pests & diseases, for over 150 plant species and varieties. Anything that is ever posted on PlantVillage is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, unless it is specifically stated otherwise. What this means is that whoever wants to use the content publicly is free to do so, but must do it with the same license, ensuring that the content will remain free and open access forever.

We do this because we feel that knowledge about growing food plants is a basic human right.

Sharing information has become much, much easier since the advent of the internet. This is largely because the main technology that the web is built on - from browsers to servers to HTML - is open and free as well.

The rapid rise of mobile phones, and smartphones in particular, means that most people on the planet now have a device with them, at all times, that runs a browser. This is incredibly powerful because it truly makes the web mobile. It's not iOS or Android or Windows that makes the web mobile - it's simply the browser that runs on these mobile operating systems. And this is why PlantVillage will always be a website that runs on every modern browser - because this ensures that every platform will always be supported as long as it has a modern browser.

However, just displaying a website on a mobile browser that was initially designed for the Desktop is often not very user friendly. This is why we will spend quite some effort in the future to make the website look great on a mobile browser as well. This requires some effort on our part, but indeed, this will be our next priority.

We have decided to write a native app for iOS for three reasons. The first is that iOS is the second most frequently used operating system on plantvillage.com (we know this from our server logs). It is not only much more popular than Android, but also than Desktop Mac OS X. The second is that it is very straightforward to develop for iOS devices - there is only one iPhone (with two different sizes), and only one major version of the operating system. Whenever iOS comes out as a new version, the uptake of the new version is usually incredibly fast. Both of these things are not true for Android, and correspondingly, developing from Android is more challenging. The third is that while we will always support a pure web version at www.plantvillage.com, we want to make use of the amazing capabilities that native applications - on whatever platform - can unlock.

So rest assured that we have all mobile phone users in mind when we think about taking PlantVillage to next step. Given limited resources like everyone else, we have to prioritize, and our highest priority was to give the most frequent mobile operating system (i.e iOS) users the best possible experience. Correspondingly, our next priority is to make sure that everyone else on a smartphone has at least a comparably good experience.

Please let me know in the comments if you think I have been unclear or if there are other things you want me to give your more details about.

Thanks for being a PlantVillager!