Wikimedia Apps/Team/iOS/Archived Updates

2022

December 2022

With our core Talk and Notifications support now complete our next focus will be on filling the remaining editor communications gaps which English Wikipedia identified on mobile apps. We’ll be making our block messages more complete, improving Abuse Filter feedback and overall improving how notices of all types are displayed to editors. You can learn more about our overall work to add these key communication channels.

• We released 7.0.0 in early December. It had our new article and user talk pages feature (phab:T301824), and an experimental feature to import shared reading lists from the Android app (phab:T322158).
• We released a patch (7.0.1) in late December that contained:
  • Analytics work, mainly for talk pages (phab:T322790, phab:T321841, phab:T322563).
  • Widget bug fixes:phab:T323946, phab:T321061
  • Added additional Wiki language support (phab:T317844).
  • Fixed a bug with duplicate error banners (phab:T323517).
• V1 of talk pages is live in the app!We will be running one more usability test to see if there is anything that can be improved for V2. If you have any feedback, please email otichonova@wikimedia.org. Thank you!

November 2022

• We added the ability to receive and import shared reading lists.phab:T322158, phab:T322805

• We started displaying our 2022 EN Wikipedia fundraising banners in the app. phab:T322950

• 7.0.0 (workboard) is in final testing and is queued up to release in early December.
• We wrapped up bug fixes and design tweaks to our new article and user talk pages. phab:T301824

• Also, similar to the last update, we are still recruiting experienced Wikipedia contributors to participate in a multilingual survey (Arabic, German, English, Chinese (Simplified)) for talk pages. This will be the last round of usability testing before the first version of native talk pages is accessible in the iOS app. If you are interested in participating in this testing phase, please email otichonova@wikimedia.org; thank you!

October 2022

• Our major update to Talk pages will be in the App Store soon! Thanks to the editors who participated in the testing and to our localization volunteers. With this and future work, we will continue making collaboration and communication between app editors and the wider community more accessible, effective, and user-friendly.
• Wrapping up development on our new article and user talk pages.
• Starting multilingual user testing on phab:T301824

• We have also started sending the new article and user talk page feature to external beta testers.phab:T301824

• A new version was released 6.9.4. For this, we updated our Vanishing screen (added a warning modal, and adjusted UI spacing) and destination email address. phab:T300080

• We started prototyping a feature to import shared reading lists from Android, for their shared reading lists experiment. phab:T322158

• We are currently recruiting experienced Wikipedia contributors to participate in a multilingual survey (Arabic, German, English, Chinese (Simplified)) for talk pages. This will be the last round of usability testing before the first version of native talk pages is accessible in the iOS app. If you are interested in participating in this phase of testing please email otichonova@wikimedia.org, thank you!

September 2022

As we enlighted our minor 6.9.3 details in August’s update, during September, we released additional enhancements and features:

• Fixes for audio playback.phab:T299808

• Link sharing in non-Latin languages and several other small improvements. phab:T307604

• New options for user support, including new debugging data options when reporting a bug.phab:T258212 phab:T300080

• New support address: ios-support@wikimedia.orgphab:T316698

In addition to bugs, or support we always appreciate your feature suggestions and wikilove!

• Continuous work to build our new talk page feature (user talk and article talk) phab:T301824
• We began user testing of the initial implementation in mid-September. phab:T315571
• As a complete to the previous point, we have successfully concluded a round of usability testing with new contributors to test the first beta build of talk pages.

The contributors were able to complete all major tasks successfully like:

• Adding a comment to an existing thread.
• Creating a new topic.
• Subscribing/unsubscribing to a topic and navigating through an article's talk page.

Also, they helped us uncover some needed tweaks to the UI.

Next, we will be working on a new usability testing script for experienced editors in the following target wikis: Arabic, Chinese (simplified), German and English.

If you are interested in participating in this next phase of testing please email otichonova@wikimedia.org, thank you!

August 2022

• As we ended July with a successful testing round of user testing for the basic ability on talk pages, during August we are working on our initial Talk UI implementation phab:T301824 and usability testing script phab:T315571 for new contributors to test a beta version of the user talk and article talk features.
• Also, we are completing a minor release, 6.9.3. that contains:
  • Bug fixes phab:T299808, phab:T310798, phab:T286821, phab:T277351, phab:T313516, phab:T307604, phab:T311238.
  • A new screen to request to vanish your Wikipedia account phab:T300080.
  • A new tool to export your data library for technical debugging purposes phab:T258212.

July 2022

• The third round of user testing was successfully ran to see whether participants understood the content and could complete tasks that test the basic usability on talk pages, which included opening a topic, using the ‘find in page’ to search for a word, replying to a comment, creating a new topic, opening all threads and subscribing to a topic. The tasks were successfully completed by all participants and the feedback from the participants helped improve some of the components and change the way the threading was presented.
• You can find more information about this particular usability test and read through all of the user research done for talk pages. Now with the research phase over our engineers are starting to build talk pages.

18 May 2022

• Notifications now available in the store! After many conversations and deep development the iOS app now supports editing notifications. You can now see you notifications and alerts in our in app Notification Center and right on your homescreen. As with all notifications on iOS, you choose how you’ll be notified and where, whether you want your @pings on your device homescreen, your digest or only when you open the app.

• We shared a survey of ideas with existing editors to gather input for our talk improvements. See context here. We're digesting all the feedback and will post our learnings soon.

29 March 2022

• The iOS team has been working hard on finishing support for Notifications, but we’ve been remiss in keeping this wiki page and our on wiki conversations. We plan to post regular updates for our Notifications and upcoming Talk page work on a regular basis going forward.
• We are getting very close to our initial beta release of Notifications. We need your help! You can sign up to test it here.
• For our Notifications work, we concluded a multi-week diary study with long time editors. The results and follow up changes can be seen on our iOS Notifications MediaWiki page.
• The iOS team is starting Talk page improvement investigations, looking at lots of research and past community consultations, what Android and Editing teams have been doing, in particular. We will start testing ideas for threading soon.

2021

The iOS team has been working on notifications in the app to let users better interact with other editors. You can see phab:T274404 for the main Phabricator task and phab:T274305 for how this could look. See also Wikimedia Apps/Team/iOS/Notifications for more information.