The app that you install on your Android phone works in conjunction with a website. It allows you to program specific events or activities and then save them as recipes. There are already some recipes that you can customize if you want and then push them out to your phone. This sounds like a pretty cool idea right? Well before you go diving in and downloading things, you might want to be aware that to build your own recipes you will need to know some coding. This is not a visual tool to get things done, we soon as you click on create you are dropped right into a code view. The other side of this is that for some reason the developers (The Israeli Information Platform and Experiences team) decided to use Facebook as the login format… So you need to know code and be willing to login with your Facebook account to get access to the higher end tools here.

So back to my point that Microsoft is using Android as its beta testing platform. You see the on{x} project manager Shira Weinberg feels that the less strict security model in Android was a better platform to work with than Windows Phone. This is a subtle slap at Google while also showing that Windows Phone might not be as flexible as it would need to be to properly develop this platform. It could also be argued that since the Windows Phone 8 platform is not out yet, there is no way to properly develop and test it yet.

So Microsoft has pushed the development and testing out the much larger base of Android owners. It might also be said that Microsoft considers Android owners more competent than Windows Phone owners (I bet that will get a few nasty comments) which could play into the way they are moving their new platforms more toward content consumption than content creation. No matter the reasons it is still a little odd to see a Microsoft project pushed out to Android phone owners in an attempt to develop a platform for Windows 8 Phone…

If you are interested you can hit up the on{x}website and check out some of the existing recipes before you head over and grab the app from the Play Store.

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