The goTenna Open SDK

I believe that for any radical new technology to reach its true potential it needs to be as open as possible. The minds of a few will never rival the collective creativity and brainpower of the world. It is with this spirit in mind that we always planned for an open software development kit (SDK) that allowed any developer in the world to leverage goTenna’s unique communications capabilities for their own applications.

The design of the SDK was meant to be as simple as possible even if that was, at times, restricting certain functionality. I believe that in product development a balance must be struck between flexibility and usability. Generally speaking, I believe that the more levers you make accessible for people to use, the more likely they are to make mistakes and perhaps not achieve their intended use case.

For this reason I insisted on a data-layer type architecture for the goTenna SDK that handled all core processing and hardware services for our external developers. Although the actual act of communicating with the goTenna took dozens of commands which could have been opened to outside users, I felt the marginal value-add of these additional features for a small subset of power users were outweighed by the workload imposed on all users. For this reason, we chained subroutines and exposed only the functional end points such as “send” “set ID” or “target ID” which resulted in an extremely simple and user-friendly SDK interface.

The average response from developers was that they all had baseline goTenna functionality working in their development environments within an hour of diving into the documentation which I believe is a testament to the team’s fantastic execution of the product. Today there are dozens of apps running on goTenna for a multitude of use cases we would have never been able to develop by ourselves - such as apps for hang glider communications, wildfire response, medical monitoring, and more!

If you’re interested in learning more you can check out this link.