I'm necroing this thread so that our new engineers can see it.
The product expectation is that we drop new feature development for iOS 6
when the following features are in production:
- Lead images
- Wikidata descriptions from mobileview
- Search improvements
- Supplement prefix search with fulltext search results
- Wikidata descriptions from PageTerms
- Read more
- Three suggestions from fulltext search backend at the bottom of
every article
- Collapsing tables and infoboxes
- Rollup disambiguation and pages issues into buttons underneath the
lead image
Dan
On 12 November 2014 at 22:05, Dan Garry <[email protected]> wrote:
> *tl;dr: The programming language used to develop new features by our iOS
> app engineering team is changing from Objective C to Swift at some point in
> the near future.*
>
> When making a native app, the language you have to implement the app in is
> chosen by the third party responsible for the platform. For iOS apps, Apple
> chose Objective C to be the language the app is written in. Objective C is
> a... very strange language. It has a lot of quirks that slow down
> development.
>
> To solve the above problem, you can now write apps in a new language
> called Swift. Notably, Swift has features that make it less error prone and
> more concise than Objective C, which should increase our velocity of
> feature development. Swift is also much more readable and in-line with
> other languages, which lowers the barrier of entry (which is currently very
> high with Objective C).
>
> Importantly, Objective C and Swift can live alongside each other. So, when
> we "switch to Swift" we do not need to rewrite all of our existing code
> from Objective C to Swift. Instead, we can just start developing new
> features using Swift, and slowly rewrite the old code from Objective C into
> Swift as time allows.
>
> On the downsides, Swift is only supported on iOS 7 and above. iOS 6 only
> represents around 5% of our user base, and we can pin iOS 6 users to the
> last version of the app we released before we used Swift. We need to decide
> what the last set of features we're want in that build are before we switch.
>
> Here are our next steps:
>
> - Evaluate more concretely whether Swift actually fits our needs or
> not. [Engineering]
> - Decide last set of features for our iOS 6 build. [Product/Design]
>
> Thanks,
> Dan
>
> --
> Dan Garry
> Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
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