Small (native) apps can do Wikimedia work quite effectively using the api
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John Vandenberg. sent from Galaxy Note On Dec 12, 2012 7:04 AM, "MZMcBride" z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
Over on the mobile team we've been chatting for a while about the various trade-offs in native vs HTML-based (PhoneGap/Cordova) development.
[...]
iOS and Android remain our top-tier mobile platforms, and we know we can
do
better on them than we do so far...
Any thoughts? Wildly in favor or against?
It's unclear from your e-mail what the goal of mobile interaction (for lack of a better term) is. Are you trying to build editing features? File upload features? Or do you want to just have a decent reader? This seems like a key component to any discussion of the future of mobile development.
Looking at the big picture, I don't think we'll ever see widespread editing from mobile devices. The user experience is simply too awful. The best I think most people are hoping for is the ability to easily fix a typo, maybe, but even then you have to assess costs vs. benefit. That is, is it really worth paying two or three full-time employees so that someone can easily change "Barrack" to "Barack" from his or her iPhone? Probably not.
Perhaps mobile uploading could use better native support, but again, is the cost worth it? Does Commons need more low-quality photos? And even as phone cameras get better, do those photos need to be _instantly_ uploaded to the site? There's something to be said for waiting until you get home to upload photos, especially given how cumbersome the photo upload process is (copyright, permissions, categorization, etc.). And this all side-steps the question of whether there are better organizations equipped at handling photos (such as Flickr or whatever).
That leaves reading. If a relatively recent browser can't read Wikimedia wikis without performance issues, I think that indicates a problem with Wikimedia wikis (way too much JavaScript, images are too large, etc.). Mobile browsers are fairly robust (vastly more robust compared to what they used to be), so I'm not sure why having a Wikipedia reader is valuable or why it's worth investing finite resources in. Occasionally I'll hear "but I want to have a favorite pages feature or I want to support offline reading," but the phone's OS should be able to handle most of this from the built-in Web browser. Or not, but I think if a phone is incapable of a feature such as "e-mail this Web page (article) to a friend," it's not an important enough feature to devote resources to.
Wikimedia wikis have a lot of bugs and the Wikimedia Foundation has finite resources. I personally only use the "Messages" and "Music" apps on my phone, so I'm not the best person to make the argument for additional mobile development, but when I look at how terrible the user experience continues to be for desktop users, it becomes difficult for me to understand why the Wikimedia Foundation would delve into the world of mobile (apart from initiatives such as Wikipedia Zero). What benefit to the creation or dissemination of free educational content are we seeing (or hoping to see) from native apps?
MZMcBride
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