To say that we've been happy about the roll outhttp://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/01/26/announcing-the-official-wikipedia-android-app/of our new Wikipedia Android app https://market.android.com/details?id=org.wikipedia would be an understatement.
In just over two weeks time we've:
* Had *827,236* total installs of our app * Become the *#1 search result* for 'Wikipedia' in the market * Held the* #1 trending spo*t in the whole Google Android market for our first week * Held both the* #4 & #5 spot in top free Books and Reference* * Made it onto the *top 100 free apps* in the Android market * Maintained a *4.5/5 star* review * Held a consistent *87% install retention rate*
And that doesn't even include our non EN numbers.
For a new app these are some truly impressive numbers and Yuvi, Brion, and the rest of the mobile team deserve all sorts of great credit for pulling this off. They've made our reviewers truly happy
Here are some of my favorite comments:
"Great Ad-free, therefore awesome." "Très bien Fait le job et fonctionne sans problème sur Galaxy Nexus." "Por fin la oficial Esta muy bien y sin ningun fallo (samsung galaxy ace)" "Plaisir libriste Nous l'attendions tous bien que ce ne soit pas sur une plate-forme Libre comme il se doit ! Topissime et plus pratique que de faire une recherche Web avec le SearchAgent le temps que firefox se lance... Merci !" "Super. Dzięki tej aplikacji mogę łatwo zmieniać język artykułu, czego brakowało mi w ich stronie minionej." "Brilliant! As someone who uses wikipedia in multiple languages, the ease of the Read in... feature is fantastic. Thank you,wikipedia! "Works great Looks great and works smoothly!"
But we certainly had our fair share of criticisms for a nasty launch bug that held on to the GSM radio even after you left the app and certain missing Android niceties like the Quick Search Box and URL intents. We fixed the first quickly and have iterated on the others to where an alpha release for them will show up shortly.
We had also long wondered if people were going to use our near by functionality. Thankfully with new stats from geonames we can easily see that were getting over 20,000 req/day (http://bit.ly/wUVHAI) for just our map functions. Soon we'll have even more stats about how many users are accessing our sites through the Android app.
There is still a lot to dohttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects/roadmapbut i'm pretty happy with our first dedicated push into the Android eco-system. Next stop, fixing up our iOS app to do the same.
--tomasz