Readers/Status updates/2018-08

This is the monthly update for 2018-08

Apps

 * The Android team has been hard at work on a limited beta test of a subset of echo notifications in the app, designed to encourage repeat contributions. Check out the full update on our project page.
 * iOS released a major redesign of the app's Explore feed, adding the ability to customize the content on your home screen and make it easier to mix content from across languages. A small follow-up bug fix update will be released early next week. iOS also made progress on design research on Wikitext editing: Watch our project page for updates soon.

Web

 * Web team have begun compiling a list of common problems that they wrestle with trying to make our content mobile friendly. The end result is Recommendations for mobile friendly articles. These are recommendations not guidelines and some are more feasible/easy to change then others. We ask that you raise awareness and contribute to the talk page with any questions, suggestions you have.
 * Web has updated the Reading/Web/Advanced mobile contributions project page and shared outcomes from Wikimania interviews.
 * We are close to running an A/B test for mobile friendly page issues - you can get a sneak preview on our staging instance which will present the new treatment 50% of the time.

Reading Infrastructure

 * Maps
 * Upgrading OS to Stretch (continued)
 * Added Stretch testing instance (deployment-maps04) to the Beta Cluster
 * Upgrading node-mapnik to 3.7.2 (mapnik 3.0.20)
 * Posted the August 14, 2018 update on Status of map styles
 * Start regenerating low-zoom levels monthly
 * Improving tooling for invalidating cached map tiles
 * Services
 * Ran Android announcement for the new multi-language search and feed issue in multiple languages
 * PCS media endpoint:
 * Updated to be ready for tags (Previously Parsoid used tags for audio)
 * Added language code for descriptions and artists
 * PCS mobile-html endpoint:
 * Made some improvements in the presentation of the content, but still more to come
 * Making change to CSS in page library to fix an infobox issue, also present in the native apps due to infobox collapsing.
 * REST Mobile endpoints have been removed from non-Wikipedia projects (T201103#4490994) (Platform team)
 * Other
 * (with MediaWiki Platform team) Added support for skin-specific selector to TemplateStyles

New Readers

 * New Reader updates can be found at Meta.

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