On 09/01/2015 11:30 AM, Ori Livneh wrote:
We appear to be running a banner campaign on the mobile web site, driving people to download the mobile app:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1
Campaign definition: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&subac...
This isn't cool. This isn't us. We don't drive people from an open platform to a closed one.
I don't necessarily think it's a great idea to push people from web to apps either, especially when we also have people working on mobile web.
I also do most of my mobile Wikipedia browsing on mobile web.
That said, I think that assessment is overly critical.
* The Android mobile app is fully free and open source (obvious, since all of our stuff is, but worth re-iterating).
* They've done a great job on the app. In particular, they've implemented features that are easier on app (or only feasible there), like a user-friendly saved pages list and a nice UI in general.
* I don't know this for sure, but I would guess the app works on fully-FOSS versions of Android (e.g. Replicant), since an updated version is in the fully-free app store (https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/org.wikipedia). If it doesn't work on Replicant (or some similar fully-FOSS Android), that does seem like something important to address.
* No one is going to install proprietary software as a result of this ad. It only shows to people who are *already* running Android and asks them to install free and open source software.
It's no different then recommending to a Windows user that they install Inkscape because it's a great piece of free and open source software.
Finally, this is indeed only configured for Finland.
Matt Flaschen