+mobile-l

Greetings. Rupert, an update!

The rebooted Android (Android 2.3+) and iOS (iOS 6+) apps will have Wikipedia Zero flourishes built into them, making it possible for the user to know whether the app access is free of data usage charges. The rebooted apps are tentatively slated for store submission at the end of the month. The flourishes will hinge on each operator's zero-rating of HTTPS.

Likewise, HTTPS contributory features are about to be introduced on the Wikipedia Zero mobile web experience as well for operators that zero-rate HTTPS.

WMF is starting the work with partner operators to add support for zero-rating of HTTPS. There will be, at least, technical hurdles (networking equipment architecture varies) in this transition, but it's underway! Indeed, we have some carriers that have noted support for HTTPS zero-rating already.

I'm very much grateful to Brion, Yuvi, and Monte for their assistance while I added code to the Android and iOS platforms, and am happy to get to work with them more while putting final touches in place this month. Props to Faidon, Mark, and Brandon in Ops Engineering as well on helping us overcome some rather non-trivial hurdles in order to retain good performance and maintainability while adding HTTPS support. 

-Adam

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 3:34 PM, Brion Vibber <bvibber@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 8:19 AM, Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Rupert, I saw your question regarding Wikipedia Zero. Wikipedia Zero is
> currently targeted for the mobile web, but I'll take this question back to
> the business team as to whether we'd be able to support zero-rating of apps
> traffic at some point in the future, at least in locales where moderate
> bandwidth is available.
>

I think that once the zero-rating is switched to support HTTPS by using
IP-based instead of Deep Packet Inspection-based HTTP sniffing, ISP
partners wouldn't actually be able to distinguish between mobile web and
mobile apps content unless we actively choose to make them use separate IPs
and domain names.

Especially if, as we think we're going to, the future Wikipedia mobile app
will consist mostly of native code widgets and modules that plug into the
web site embedded in a web control... it'll be loading mostly the same web
pages from the same servers, but running a different mix of JavaScript.

-- brion

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