There basically were three reasons for this "mini" version:

1. When connectivity is an issue, size does matter. If you look at the 20+ main offline medical apps out there, you'll see that they all range in the 25-40Mb (the largest being 120Mb). Several of them have 1M+ downloads, and even if I am no physician I'd say their content is rather minimal and that WP content is far better: yet people download the other, smaller apps rather than our gigantic, all-encompassing 1.2 Gb one;

2. You may have heard that thing about 60% of mobile readers not going past the Lead section [2]. We did too, and took the drastic step of removing everything below that - basically keeping only the lead part and infobox. That saved us about 60%;

3. Then we looked at what was left and figured that infobox illustrations weren't that helpful: either because they look good but are not very informative, or because if they are in fact informative offline limitations make it impossible to see more than a thumbnail. Don't get me wrong: the ability to see high-res images comes high on the list of requests, but a choice was to be made and that one was a low-hanging fruit. So we removed the illustations as well, and now we're left with a 90% smaller app.

In spite of its size, the current Wikimed is rated higher (4.7) and kept longer (75% retention at D30) that most apps (4.2/20%, respectively on average): we’ll keep you posted on how the new app fares in comparison to that.

Cheers,