Hi everyone,
The Android team has recently released watchlists, talk pages, and an image recommendations experiment. To make sure we hear from editors we don't normally hear from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Android/Communication/UsertestingJuly2021#Primary_feedback_audience in the software development process, and who might have needs and use cases we miss, we also specifically reached out to a list of communities, regions, and types of users.
We were fortunate enough to also get some feedback from Indonesian Wikipedia editors, Arabic editors in Morocco, and an English Wikipedia editor based in Nigeria. The outcomes of our respondents' qualitative feedback https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Android/Communication/UsertestingJuly2021#Results, coupled with previous feedback from the community and members of staff, along with an ABC test https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290995 we are finishing up, has resulted in us finalizing the changes we are making in the app to ensure communication is not lost for our users.
Our most recent release https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia now ensures users can see their notifications in-app no matter what screen they are on, including while reading an article, something that was highly requested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mobile_communication_bugs.
Before After
As we wrap up our work on notifications, we will shift from ensuring every user that edits on the Android app can clearly see the notifications and alerts they've received to ensuring the workflows for sending a communication are as intuitive as possible for mobile devices. We already have native user and article talk pages in the app. We will now conduct research to see what gaps exist for our users, and introduce new (to us) concepts like quick reactions; please check out this demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-xQSCREGic to see our ideas so far.
We hope you will engage with us and tell us any thoughts you have regarding promoting communication in our movement through the use of our tools. We also encourage you to send more users our way that meet the demographics we requested for notifications. Feel free to reach out to our team https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team, or comment on our team's communications project talk page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Android/Communication .
PS: If you're an iOS user, they're also working on some great things https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/iOS/Notifications#September_2021_update related to communications.
Cheers,