The general problem is that everything's a moving target; new capabilities
come to the web browsers.... but often a year or two behind native app
interfaces, or only for the latest versions. Android 2.3's browser is still
hanging around out there, it's the IE 6 of the mobile web. :)
Boot2Gecko/Firefox OS is very interesting, but we don't have a lot of
resources assigned to it right now. (Our Firefox OS app is based on the old
PhoneGap-based web/native hybrid app codebase, but runs as a "pure" web app
with no special on-device privileges.)
Currently the Wikipedia Zero team has ownership on the Firefox OS Wikipedia
app as FxOS is mostly being rolled out in developing countries so that ties
in with carrier relationships and preinstall agreements that are in that
group's territory. If you're interested in helping out with refactoring it,
some folks may be interested as well!
(Another initiative of interest is Chrome mobile apps -- I don't have a
link handy but I've heard that Google's working on a Chrome-based web app
runtime for at least Android phones that sounds similar to how Firefox for
Android handles Firefox web apps, making them available "almost native" but
with a specific browser runtime instead of the old crappy default browser.)
It might though be more interesting to try to bring progressive enhancement
to the MediaWiki+MobileFrontend web interface; but it's tricky to make
things like offline really work reliably without a lot of retooling of the
frontend into JavaScript.
-- brion
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 9:43 AM, Svetlana <svetlana(a)fastmail.com.au> wrote:
Hi,
I had earlier (around middle of August) made an assumption that mobile
apps are a waste of
effort. I would like to apologize for that, here; I was assuming that in an
ideal world, browsers are consistent, their styling is pretty, their
cache and storage is functional and reliable. This is not the case, and
mobile apps
exist partly for this reason - to bring a reliable pretty application to
a specific platform.
An interesting question is whether we can expect to see that ideal world
coming. Is there something that prevents it from being reached, in
theory? How
does the Boot2Gecko project help to meet this goal, if at all?
svetlana
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