App related 

Discontinuing the DroidWiki app

florian 1,230 Comments

Back in the time, I started this blog with my first blog post here, where I explained, how I customized the Wikipedia app to be an app for the DroidWiki wiki.

Since then, I updated the app multiple times, trying to make this process much more easy, less time consuming and taking less of a day and manual work. However, unfortunately, this turned out to be a really tough task and it didn’t work so well, to be honest.

One of the big things that this opinion is based on, is the fact, that the app is still (and ever was) really tight to be made for Wikipedia. This means, that a lot of stuff is developed especially to match the Wikipedia way of how content is organized and articles are structured. But even on the technical site, where I thought it would be easier to catch up, a lot of services exists to provide content to the Wikipedia app. These services, like the mobile-content-service (which is nowadays called the Page-Content-Service, PCS), are somewhat hard to setup, highly depend on a RESTbase installation and, this is my feeling at least, easily break with future updates when the configuration structure changes without any notice.

This all lead me to re-consider if maintaing the DroidWiki app and the additional services on the backend side, really brings a benefit which would pay off all of the hard work. Looking at the actual usage and installation rate from the Play Store gave a really frustating impression. The app is used by some people, however, if I compare the stats with the mobile website, which is also provided by droidwiki.org, it is really just a smal percentage, if at all.

Combining all of this and forming a conclusion: The DroidWiki app is not worth the work it requires to be kept updated. This means, that the app, from now on, will be unpublished from the Play Store and will not get any updates anymore. The source code will still be available on github, however, it will be archived and kept as it is (on an outdated version already). Everyone who wants to use the DroidWiki on a mobile phone is more than welcome to use the really mature mobile website, which is automatically used when opening droidwiki.org on a mobile browser.

Links

MediaWiki app for droidwiki.org based on https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/admin/projects/apps/android/wikipedia
https://github.com/droidwiki/apps-android-droidwiki
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