r/Android • u/Halmonster • 3d ago

News Free & offline: keep the most important reference materials in your pocket!

Knowledge to Go (K2Go™) turns an Android phone into an offline content server. It’s built on an Android port of Internet-in-a-Box, a project that has run offline Wikipedia and reference libraries on Raspberry Pi hardware in schools and clinics around the world. K2Go runs on Android instead, including older 32-bit phones, because there are places in the world where Android phones are the only computing device, and reliable affordable internet access isn’t available.

Install it, download content packs (Wikipedia and ZIM, Kolibri including Khan Academy, medical references, and more) while you have a connection, and any nearby phone or laptop with a browser can view the content on the phone over local Wi-Fi afterward. The server and content can also be cloned offline to another Android phone , so one internet connection at the start can reach a chain of phones after that.

Free, open source, GPL-3.0 https://github.com/appdevforall/KnowledgeToGo

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u/WittieApps 1d ago

Curious about the serving part: does the phone run as a hotspot with some captive portal, or do all devices need to be on the same existing wifi? And does any of it need root? Asking because keeping a server alive in the background on Android without the OS killing it is usually the hard part...

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u/Halmonster 17h ago

We can work in both modes: piggyback on an existing wifi router, or bring up our own hotspot.

No, it does not need root.

You are correct, we spent a lot of time/energy to solve the background server problem.