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commons-app / apps-android-commons

The Wikimedia Commons Android app allows users to upload pictures from their Android phone/tablet to Wikimedia Commons
https://commons-app.github.io/
Apache License 2.0
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Showing the Wikimedia Commons Home page #5772

Open prototyperspective opened 1 month ago

prototyperspective commented 1 month ago

What is the user problem or growth opportunity you want to see solved?

Would it be possible to show the mobile version of the Wikimedia Commons Main page / recreate it in the app by querying things?

It has things like categories to explore in the "Content" tile, a "Media of the day" tile (note videos still don't play in the app), shows the "Picture of the Day", and has links to useful pages like the Community Portal, Introduction page, and so on.

How do you know that this problem exists today? Why is this important?

Even the Wikipedia app shows a tile for "Picture of the day" but not the Commons app and that all those things mentioned above are missing means it makes more sense to use the mobile website rather than the app for many users, especially people new to WMC.

Who will benefit from it?

All mobile users who do or could use the app. I think this is a key feature and the app can't really be recommended / be linked from the Wikimedia Commons home page or large Wikipedia pages until the app is at least as good as the mobile version of the site where the user starts at this Home page.

Anything else you would like to add?

This could be a complementary feature to or a subtask of #5624.

I don't think it's an alternative or duplicate of it – however it could be a quick-to-implement temporary solution until that such a proper Discover Home Feed page is created if one could use WebView.

prototyperspective commented 1 month ago

The Wikipedia app shows the Main page whenever opening a new tab. And at this point they also have it separate from the Home feed. Since the new tab button is a bit hidden, that is a bit hidden. Maybe they add it to the feed at a later point.

Maybe one could implement it in the same way for WMC. Would be nice if somebody could add info on how and what they load, there is a isMainPage variable which is probably set to true when the Main page page is loaded.

nicolas-raoul commented 1 month ago

Thanks for the ideas!

Just to set expectations: Let's keep in mind that we have zero budget and our developers are already stretched (more volunteers always welcome by the way!), so we focus on areas where a native app really brings 10x value over a webapp: upload. Thanks for your understanding and for your interest. :-)

misaochan commented 1 month ago

I think this task and/or the related one #5624 could be a good topic for a hackathon or GSoC/Outreachy project? It's interesting and largely self-contained.