User blog comment:FishTank/State of Mobile 2021/@comment-954127-20201216011616/@comment-4522253-20201216164040

I'm glad that we have a chance to talk about this. The Mobile Main Page (MMP) is a bit difficult to set up, especially if it has broken images or under-developed categories. All wikis that appear in the Fandom app and/or have a Wiki Manager should have an up-to-date MMP, which is used by any mobile web or app reader that accesses the wiki's main page. It helps to think of MMP as a map of the wiki for mobile navigation (and a way to point out content your wiki wants to spotlight) rather than as a traditional wikitext main page. We have found that wikitext main pages don't translate well to a good mobile experience — usually because they have too many links or too much information. The mobile viewport gets cluttered with things the typical user doesn't travel to or see. You can see for yourself what the wikitext version of a main page looks like on wikis with MMPs by tapping "View more" on the main page with a mobile device. You can also enter Responsive mode on most web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) to see what an MMP looks like from your desktop.

I've added some links to some of our Best Practices posts, not because they're "law", but because they are developed to guide wikis through making the best experiences for others on their wikis. We have researched these heavily through the volumes of data we see from our servers, what we know about the internet industries and where they are going, and years of experience managing wikis. We don't use polls to develop them, but we do incorporate our own experiences (most of the folks involved edit wikis and manage contractors or volunteer groups that edit wikis).

Since you mentioned it, I looked up how many users do as you said you do (desktop mode on mobile). In the last year, about 1.7% of pageviews and 1.5% of sessions that used the desktop skin came from mobile devices. That is a small, but not insignificant number. Digging deeper, though, only about 52% of those sessions were looking at the main namespace. This is also likely to mean that desktop mode was engaged so that the editing functions would be revealed; I expect this number to go down significantly as more wikis gain access to the mobile editor on UCP. Of the remainder, 20% were article comments (as leaving a comment still requires desktop mode), and the rest have no mobile skins (and therefore don't need desktop mode enabled to be seen): 10% Special pages, 4.6% Talk pages, 4.25% Template pages, 2.4% Project pages, and so on. As a result, we can statistically eliminate desktop mode on mobile to be a very common use case. I know that shouldn't minimize your personal experience, which is still important for us to listen to. However, I would hope that you give the newer mobile experiences and tools a try as we develop them. We may even make a believer out of you!