Technology is going to reflect the values of the people who built it. That's something I ran into recently when I was trying, like hell I might add, to get the Android simulator set up for React Native.
As a journalist-turned-developer one of the things that always blows my mind about technology is how dogmatic the people who grew up in this world can be. Folks are practically religious about their languages or preferences, which is strange to me, given that I come to this world from journalism and media, where you can use different tools to accomplish the same goals on any given day.
This attitude infects the technology itself over time, and trying to set up the Android simulator for the first time was exemplary of this.
Like most developers I know I have Mac laptop. So it was second nature to me to use the XCode simulator when I began developing in React Native. Once I got to the point where I needed to see how the code looked on an Android device, I ran into a series of problems that highlight the vast disconnect between people who make technology, and those who use it.
About 82% of people use Android, only about 18% use iOS, yet setting up an Android simulator was a nightmare. Think about that: trying to make technology for the vast majority of users has more barriers than making technology for a small minority of users.
In an industry obsessed with user experience, this makes no sense — unless you think about who's making the technology (people with higher incomes who can afford Apple products), and their experience using it, versus those for whom they are making it (people who make less money and buy Android products).
Seeing a React Native project in the simulator is as simple as a CLI command. Seeing an Android project in the simulator involves installing Android Studio with special instructions, making sure you have a bunch of files in your Android folder and on your machine, and ultimately giving up and installing Genymotion.
Shoutout to Chris Geirman, I couldn't have done it without you.
So what's the point? The point is that we have to think outside of our experiences, and at least try to think into the experiences of our users when we build technology. Otherwise your device won't work on people with dark skin or tattoos, you'll build health app that ignore women completely, or you'll tag people with dark skin as gorillas.
This stuff matters because we are imperfect beings, so we build imperfect things, if you don't stop and think about it, you're going to mess it up.