@JMinor uh oh... there are cases of images with transparency which have white parts adjacent to transparent parts of the image. The grey background prevented such white parts from blending in with the white background... I can dig for examples if necessary... there's a ticket somewhere... but that's why a faint grey was chosen originally...

Link to patch:
https://github.com/wikimedia/wikipedia-ios/pull/1177

Per @JMinor I'll try to dig up the original ticket/info. No worries if design wan't aware - it pre-dated even phab iirc.

Hey all - I dug around in various places (old emails, ancient trello boards etc) for 15 minutes or so and was unable to track down the examples I recalled. They're out there somewhere I swear ;) Just wanted to make sure we were aware... I'm totally cool with us re-addressing this later if needed.

Hi @Mhurd I checked in with @pau + @RHo re: the white background. Some of the thinking that went into the decision to move to a white background:

• A white background seems to be a common format stipulated by science journals (eg. Nature: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/submit/how-to-submit [see Figure Guidelines]).
• Uploaded images are often created with the assumption that they will be displayed over a white surface (i.e., as part of the article body).
• Checkered background has been tried in the past and did not relieve the issue.

(Pau and Rita, feel free to elaborate, I'm just paraphrasing from our chat)

Testing criteria:

1. Go to the linked article in the description
2. Verify that the image is shown on a white background.

Appears to be fixed. I tried a number of pages which appeared to have transparent background images and all showed up on a white background.

@julbod Thanks for your contribution!

This will be in our next beta, coming out shortly, and in the store in the next couple weeks.