Google pilots offline developer kit on DVDs for Internet-challenged regions

Google is offering an offline developer kit that includes select resources aimed at Internet-challenged regions, the company announced today. The content includes Software Development Kits (SDKs), developer videos, and documentation.

Google offers a ton of developer content and resources online, but this is largely inaccessible to many parts of the world with limited Internet access, whether that means expensive, unreliable, or non-existent. Some developers in these regions can’t easily find the content they need, have trouble streaming tutorials, or aren’t even able to download an SDK.

The offline developer kit, current as of August 2014, attempts to solve this by offering the following on a pack of four DVDs:

• The entire I/O Dev Bytes Series
• Full Google Udacity course videos (Android, App Engine, HTML5 games, UX, Mobile Web)
• The entire Android Website: http://developer.android.com
• Material Design docs from http://google.com/design
• Web Fundamentals documentation from http://developers.google.com/web
• The Google Cloud Platform docs from https://developers.google.com/cloud
• Android, Cloud, and Design videos from the Google Developers YouTube channel

If you want the kit for personal use, you should know the total size of all the above amounts to about 30GB. You can download it yourself from Google Drive (the content is distributed under the Creative Commons and Apache licenses, so you can share it however you like).

If you are interested in distributing the developer kit, Google asks that you get in touch with a Google Developer Group. Organizations like schools, tech hubs, or incubators should fill out this form.

Google says it has already distributed over 2,000 of these kits through Google Developer Groups in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Bangladesh. Now the company is releasing the kit as a download so others can help get the content into developers’ hands.

It’s important to emphasize that this is still a pilot. Google could decide to stop offering it at any moment, meaning the content will quickly become outdated as it won’t be possible to get newer DVDs. For now, though, the kit is still a great place to start.