On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 4:35 PM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
Any thoughts? Wildly in favor or against?
From Brion's original email as well as my perspective from being involved
in these projects, I am in favor of shifting to native code for iOS and Android. Considering the goals of the mobile team for 2012/2013 [1] include building contributory features (beyond basic editing and even beyond just uploading photos [and while certainly some mobile devices have terrible cameras, many have exceptional cameras]), the fact that we've been thinking about contributory pipelines that involve multiple devices, and the fact that we've had headaches building contributory features using Cordova, shifting to a native codebase for the most used mobile platforms makes a LOT of sense.
One argument that could be made against shifting to a native codebase for the android/iOS apps is that of accessibility to our engineering community. The great thing about Cordova is the fact that 99% of what you need to know to dive in is HTML and JS. However, we do have Java devs and Objective C devs in the community - and creating more things in those language could also help attract other engineers who like to focus on that kind of stuff into our community. Overall, I think the benefits far outweigh the potential drawbacks.
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals#Mobile