On 09/01/2015 11:30 AM, Ori Livneh wrote:
We appear to be running a banner campaign on the
mobile web site, driving
people to download the mobile app:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1
Campaign definition:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&suba…
This isn't cool. This isn't us. We don't drive people from an open platform
to a closed one.
I don't necessarily think it's a great idea to push people from web to
apps either, especially when we also have people working on mobile web.
I also do most of my mobile Wikipedia browsing on mobile web.
That said, I think that assessment is overly critical.
* The Android mobile app is fully free and open source (obvious, since
all of our stuff is, but worth re-iterating).
* They've done a great job on the app. In particular, they've
implemented features that are easier on app (or only feasible there),
like a user-friendly saved pages list and a nice UI in general.
* I don't know this for sure, but I would guess the app works on
fully-FOSS versions of Android (e.g. Replicant), since an updated
version is in the fully-free app store
(
https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/org.wikipedia). If it doesn't work on
Replicant (or some similar fully-FOSS Android), that does seem like
something important to address.
* No one is going to install proprietary software as a result of this
ad. It only shows to people who are *already* running Android and asks
them to install free and open source software.
It's no different then recommending to a Windows user that they install
Inkscape because it's a great piece of free and open source software.
Finally, this is indeed only configured for Finland.
Matt Flaschen