Hi everyone,

Those of you who were at the Mobile quarterly review heard me mention Facebook Lite, an app that's designed especially for the developing world.

Notably, their app has a lot of optimisations which make it good for users in developing world:

It's only 252kB, good for limited data plans.
It supports down to Android 2.2, good for older devices.
It's data-efficient, good for 2G connections and for people on limited data plans.

From a development perspective, some advantages are:

You no longer have to support older versions of Android in your main app.
You can tailor the performance of the lite app to the older devices so it's faster.
You can tailor the features of the lite app to the developing market.

So obviously there are a lot of advantages for our users if we do this. And, selfishly, I can't stress enough how much dropping Android 2.3 from our current app would speed up development. As an example, almost all of the edge cases with lead images occurred on 2.3 devices, and they required quite a lot of investigation and hacking to fix them up. Obviously we've not dropped 2.3 so far because it's a very strategically important part of our user base, which I'm sure Carolynne can attest to!

I'd say that we should put some serious thought into whether we'd prefer to have a Wikipedia Lite app for the developing world, rather than our current "one app to rule them all".

Comments? Questions?

Dan

Dan Garry

Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps

Wikimedia Foundation