On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:

Here's one for you, mobile devs :) I just installed the Wikipedia app from the firefoxos marketplace on my android phone.

It works great, but i was wondering what's the difference between that app and the one from the playstore, as far as the OS is concerned. Are they launched differently? Does any of them use system-specific code, except the required stuff, such as the manifest file on ffos?

The answers are probably already on some wiki, but I can't make out the answer from the pages i've read.

The Firefox OS app is based on the same source code as the current Android and iOS app, but it's currently missing a couple of features like offline support which we didn't have a chance to get working in Firefox yet. (It's also really easy to exit it by mistake on Android by pushing the system back button! This doesn't happen on Firefox OS itself, as Firefox phones don't have a back button.)

Note that the mobile web site for Wikipedia is currently much more advanced than the app in many ways -- we're going to retool the app in a few months to bring their feature sets together (without duplicating too much code for advanced or rare functionality).

(Currently the mobile apps team is still working on the Commons photo uploader for iOS and Android, which is our first 'native mobile code' project. It's looking like the updated Wikipedia app will be a hybrid app, with some native UI components and system integration, but lots of the web code used so we don't have to reimplement things like.... oh... the Visual Editor... in native code. ;)

-- brion

Thanks, Strainu _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l