As it is the last Thursday of the month, the Mobile Apps Team submitted [1] its latest work to production. This month the majority of the work was backend work.
On iOS, the primary user-facing change is that we redesigned the "Credits" screen to instead by an "About the Wikipedia app" screen. On the back-end, our network operations code, migrating from a home-baked solution to an open source networking library called
AFNetworking, which should increase stability, reduce random crashes and freezes, and reduce the amount of time we have to spend in the weeds of networking.
On Android, the primary user-facing change is that our app is now more in line with Google's standards for the look and feel of Android apps. On the back end, we transformed almost all of our
Activities into
Fragments, which allowed us to also transition away from our custom-baked pseudoactionbar to using the actual
ActionBar, and is also a requirement for the app to be featured in Google Play.
We're hoping that next month's releases will contain improvements to search so that users can find what they need, and on Android we're also hoping to ship improvements to the styling of the lead of articles so that it's more consistent, usable, and beautiful.
Stay tuned for future updates!
Thanks,
Dan
[1]: As always, the discrepancy between iOS and Android here means that the Android update is now live, and the iOS update will be at some point in the future when Apple is done reviewing the update.
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Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation