Hello!
The analytics team is happy to announce that the Unique Devices data is now available to be queried programmatically via an API.
This means that getting the daily number of unique devices [1] for English Wikipedia for the month of February 2016, for all sites (desktop and mobile) is as easy as launching this query:
https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/en.wikipedia.org/al...
You can get started by taking a look at our docs: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Unique_Devices#Quick_Start
If you are not familiar with the Unique Devices data the main thing you need to know is that is a good proxy metric to measure Unique Users, more info below.
Since 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation used comScore to report data about unique web visitors. In January 2016, however, we decided to stop reporting comScore numbers [2] because of certain limitations in the methodology, these limitations translated into misreported mobile usage. We are now ready to replace comscore numbers with the Unique Devices Dataset . While unique devices does not equal unique visitors, it is a good proxy for that metric, meaning that a major increase in the number of unique devices is likely to come from an increase in distinct users. We understand that counting uniques raises fairly big privacy concerns and we use a very private conscious way to count unique devices, it does not include any cookie by which your browser history can be tracked [3].
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices [2] [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ComScore/Announcement [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices#How_do_we_count_uniq... devices.3F