prague Archives - Addshore

The Wikimedia Commons Android App allows users to upload photos to Commons directly from their phone.

The website for the app details some of the features and the code can be found on GitHub.

A hackathon was organized in Prague to work on the app in the run up to the yearly Wikimedia Hackathon which is in Vienna this year.

A group of 7 developers worked on the app over a few days and as well as meeting each other and learning from each other they also managed to work on various improvements which I have summarised below.

2 factor authentication (nearly)

Work has been done towards allowing 2fa logins to the app.

Lots of the login & authentication code has been refactored and the app now uses the clientlogin API module provided by Mediawiki instead of the older login module.

When building to debug the 2fa input box will appear if you have 2fa login enabled, however the current production build will not show this box and simply display a message saying that 2fa is not currently supported. This is due to a small amount of session handling work that the app still needs.

Better menu & Logout

As development on the app was fairly non existent between mid 2013 and 2016 the UI generally fell behind. This is visible in forms, buttons as well as app layout.

One significant push was made to drop the old style ‘burger’ menu from the top right of the app and replace it with a new slide out menu draw including a feature image and icons for menu items.

Uploaded images display limit

Some users have run into issues with the number of upload contributions that the app loads by default in the contributions activity. The default has always been 500 and this can cause memory exhaustion / OOM and a crash on some memory limited phones.

In an attempt to fix and generally speed up the app a recent upload limit has been added to the settings which will limit the number images and image details that are displayed, however the app will still fetch and store more than this on the device.

Nearby places enhancements

The nearby places enhancements probably account for the largest portion of development time at the pre hackathon. The app has always had a list of nearby places that don’t have images on commons but now the app also has a map!

The map is powered by the mapbox SDK and the current beta uses the mapbox tiles however part of the plan for the Vienna hackathon is to switch this to using the wikimedia hosted map tiles at https://maps.wikimedia.org.

The map also contains clickable pins that provide a small pop up pulling information from Wikidata including the label and description of the item as well as providing two buttons to get directions to the place or read the Wikipedia article.

Image info coordinates & image date

Extra information has also been added to the image details view and the image date and coordinates of the image can now be seen in the app.