Mobile/Release history

This details mobile release history on mobile and the current features we are working on.

Mobile Web
The mobile web version of Wikipedia makes use of three modes - alpha, beta and stable. Stable mode is the default experience for all users, however users can opt into other modes where they get additional features at the expensive of slightly less stability. Beta is generally bug free or close to bug free and is where we stage features and tweak them to perfection before releasing them to the wild. Our experimental (alpha) mode is as it suggests - very experimental. There are lots more features here and a higher probability of bugs. Developers are encouraged to submit new feature ideas for alpha testing as long as there is no other feature which tries to solve the same problem. Alpha features will be assessed based on user feedback as well as through the use of EventLogging and the best ones will be moved to beta.

The purpose of this page is to explain what features you can expect in both alpha and beta modes, how long these experiments/projects have been running and who has been working on the code.

Beta
Features shortlisted for stable N/A

Currently sitting in beta
 * Wikigrok A
 * Revision / Diff improvements:
 * A view source button when viewing old revisions (see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54484)
 * Talk page overlay (begun in June 2013 by User:Jdlrobson)
 * Add topics
 * Red links are enabled. (Cannot be pushed to stable until we investigate user behavior - do people get reverted? Do they need handholding etc?)

Alpha

 * Wikigrok B
 * Talk
 * bubble has the number of open talk topics in it
 * ability to reply to talk topics.
 * New features
 * Categories - introduced in August 2013 as volunteer patch by Linas Valiukas
 * Language overlay improvements
 * [Candidate for promotion/deletion] Favorite languages. Prioritize the list of languages with your most widely used ones first. First introduced by User:jdlrobson. [does this currently work?]
 * Toggling
 * Ability to open all sections by default via Special:MobileOptions


 * Category Overlay (added in MediaWiki 1.25/wmf7; )
 * Show Categories of a page in an Overlay by clicking the "Categories" button at the footer of an article


 * Nearby button (added in MediaWiki 1.25/wmf7; )
 * Find articles near to the position of the currently viewing article by clicking the "Nearby" button at the footer of an article
 * Fontchanger
 * Change the font size of the content (added in MediaWiki 1.25/wmf12; )

Scrapped Experiments
Some experiments don't make it to stable. The following features were dropped from alpha:

[Removing from Alpha in I5c731661ea059f61a4cb6cb5ce0409e37115f68b] No main page special casing - in stable main pages are special cased. We'd rather they weren't. This provides an environment with additional styles which reduces the need.

Mobile Web Features
Here is a summary of what stable users get.

iOS
Fill me in! :-)