When we discontinued the Commons native mobile app in favor of working on the new Wikipedia app, we vaguely planned to add photo upload capability back into the Wikipedia app at some point.
I'm opening a ticket here to track this in case people are interested in chipping in before the Mobile Apps teams get a chance to work on it.
In the team's current Trello boards this is covered by this card in the backlog: https://trello.com/c/EUzll8Ie/552-photo-uploader-in-the-article-edit-screen
Can somebody post a link to where the community voted to discontinue the Commons app?
Can the use cases of the Commons app even be easily integrated into the Wikipedia app? For example the different Wiki loves ... campaigns?
There was no vote; the team simply pulled it from the app stores because it was unmaintained and buggy, so leaving it up for download was doing people a disservice.
If folks are more interested in revitalizing the old Commons uploader as an unofficial app than poking the features into the Wikipedia app, I'd be happy to help/advise, but you may have to take on the maintenance yourself.
I think it should be more a discussion about the needs of the community. If the community wants a certain app or a certain function in the app, then WMF should allocate funds to such a project.
There were multiple requests on the Commons App page to integrate map functions and the ability to find photo spots (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Apps/Commons). Why weren't these requests taken into account when the development team moved on?
I also think it is odd for the development team to move to another project and leave the page in this unclear state about the app's development (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Commons).
I agree with the two points Tobias made concerning community involvement and status clarification. Personally, i think that a dedicated Commons app fits more to the community needs since photographers and editors are separate sub-communities with their own needs. A mix could end up with a thing both do not want to use.
"I think it should be more a discussion about the needs of the community. If the community wants a certain app or a certain function in the app, then WMF should allocate funds to such a project."
Funds don't cut it. You need actual people. Who understand the community and who are familiar with the ecosystem of the wikimedia platform. And for many of these things, to do it right, you also need to rework a lot of existing systems and build additional related systems, next to your actual 'goal project'. This is something that people tend to conveniently overlook and which has led to many of the software failures of the WMF that we have seen up until last year.
"Why weren't these requests taken into account when the development team moved on" - probably because it required significant engineering effort (as in, we still don't have a maps server, let alone a reusable framework around that server to use the maps) and priorities shifted towards a more dedicated effort on the Wikipedia app. Also, if the core functionality is already buggy, then it's probably a bad idea to prioritize additional features over the buggy core behavior.
@TheDJ: Thanks for the comment. I know the ecosystem is large and complex. And the best way to keep everybody on the same page in such a system is good communication. I am being extra outspoken about this, because there are many people, that were users of that app, that never knew what happened to the app, don't know what Metawiki is, and certainly will not comment in a bug tracking system.
I can't really say anything about WMF's software history, but I think that failure to deliver on a feature is not inherently bad, because non-technical people only care about results. It doesn't matter if it is a new feature or a short message telling someone, that the feature they requested, can't be done at the moment. If it is anything I could accuse WMF's software development process of, then it would be not delivering on the latter.
And in the second paragraph you probably misunderstood me. I didn't mean consider the features for the Commons app, but consider the features when moving on. This bug report was opened only after I pinged the developers on the app page (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Apps/Commons), because of unanswered messages. That is one year, after it actually should have been opened. Please also don't misunderstand my outspokenness, I know people are busy and I am also often forgetful. But In order do things right as a community we need to rely on each other. And I hope that my comments reminded some of the engineers to not forget about the little things, like monitoring a talk page.
I like the stand alone Commons app a lot. I still have it on my phone. It's basically the only way I use to upload photos I took myself. I would love to see a replacement for that.
This discussion is outside the scope of this Phabricator task. I suggest contacting the Community Engagement Team to discuss this. Details for their team are here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_(Product)
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Can not believe this has been dead for so long. WMF sucks still the same, no surprise at all - what are their millions in assets good for when they do not fund such a simple feature??? This does not make sense...
Hello, WMF staff already working on this??? Not planned in this decade? Oh, what a pitty!
The decade is only starting, so it's possible we will add this feature at some point. In the meantime, have you tried the Commons app?
Using Commons app for ages. WMF has a long standing track record of very little ongoing development so this actually is no surprise at all. I was just wondering if this could ever change one day...
Received an email request to add Commons into the app - this would certainly be appreciated by that user