Hi everyone,

We're very excited to bring you our latest update to the Wikipedia Beta app, which should be available on the Google Play Store shortly[1].

The updated app packs a ton of awesome new features, the biggest of which are:

* Lead Images -- When navigating to an article, the app now displays the most relevant image from the article at the very top, with the image expanded to fit the width of your screen, and the title of the article overlaid onto it.  This provides a much improved visual context of the article, and a better entry point into starting your reading experience. (We're even doing face-detection in the image, so that photos of persons are properly aligned in the viewing area)

* Image Viewer -- Tapping on any image in an article (including the lead image) will take you to a full-screen image viewer where the image may be panned and zoomed. It also displays the caption, as well as author and license information, overlaid on top of the image (tap once on the image to make the descriptions slide away).  There are also options, accessible from the toolbar on the top right, for sharing the image, saving it to the photo gallery on your device, showing miscellaneous information (Exif) about the image, and navigating to its File: page on Wikipedia.

* Search enhancements -- We have improved the search experience (accessible from the top toolbar) to intelligently incorporate search results from title-only searches, as well as full-text searches, so that typing a search term will give you the most relevant result, without having to switch between Title and Full-text search.

More minor enhancements include:

* Wikidata descriptions in Nearby search results.
* Improved design of collapsed infoboxes and tables.
* Improved design of the main toolbar and search interface.
* Now bundling license information for open-source libraries that we use in the app (accessible from the More -> About screen)
* Now using ProGuard in some portions of the app package, making it a bit smaller in size.
* Numerous bug fixes for crashes and compatibility with various device types.

We hope you enjoy using the updated app, and as always, we welcome your feedback!
Cheers,

Dmitry Brant
Mobile Apps Team (Android)
Wikimedia Foundation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_mobile_engineering

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia.beta