ATAK Versions, Plugins and Development Rules

ATAK and its plugin ecosystem has ensured that what started out as a situational awareness tool has morphed into the central pane of glass for the dismounted soldier within the tactical environment. Plugins are what allows a user to extend the ATAK core functionality to controlling UAV’s, ingesting data streams through to deploying artificial intelligence at the tactical edge.

A central part of the ATAK plugin system is the signing of a plugin to authorize it’s use with official releases of ATAK. Typically this previously meant a fairly opaque process, which was held within the TAK Product Center and required developers to be either authorized by either being on a US DOD program of record or via a international MOU. Fairly recently this has been changed with the advent of the Third Party Pipeline on the tak.gov website.

The availability of the pipeline to third party developers (anyone who can sign up for an account) can now sign their own plugins for distribution as a third party developer. This coupled with changes with ATAK starting around 4.2, civ signed plugins via the Third Party Pipeline can now be loaded and used with all variants of ATAK, not just civ.

What does that mean? well this has opened up ATAK Development and removed the constraint that all plugins are required to go through the TAK Product Centre, yes in some circumstances it is beneficial, i.e. when a plugin is government owned or is targeted at being distributed via the central tak.gov website, however for a wider supply chain it is now possible to generate plugins and provide them direct to your end users.

At Xi Systems we have signed plugins for use as well as distribution on Google Play Store, we continue to experiment with distribution channels, ensuring we can deliver plugins to our clients via routes that are useable and accessible.