For almost two years now, Wikia has been designing and publishing apps to the Android’s Google Play store and Apple’s App Store. Thus far, we’ve published over 100 apps, which works out to about one new release per week. Not too shabby!
I probably don’t need to tell you that these apps have been a smashing success. In July alone, we had four million active users across all apps and 380,000 new users register with Wikia. And since we started creating apps in November of 2014, they’ve been downloaded 34 million times. That’s why we’re going to continue investing in creating new apps, as well as upgrading the apps you’ve already downloaded.
The future of apps is better integration of our new Discussions feature, which is still in active development; a new homepage that will allow you to “Save” or “Favorite” pages; and, further down the road, the ability to edit directly from the app. We also want to better-integrate Wikia accounts and preferences; ideally, we want a seamless experience between using Wikia on a desktop, on mobile web, or in our apps.
How can my community get an app?[]
If you want an app, we want to hear from you! We can’t give them to everyone, unfortunately, as they take some design and development work on our end. Our criteria for creating an app isn’t written in stone, but we have some general principles:
- The community’s topic has to have a broad, active fanbase.
- There has to be enough content and categories to fill out a mobile main page and an active userbase that can keep the content up-to-date.
- Where possible, we want communities that have strong followings in non-English speaking countries.
- It’s a plus if there’s a bright future ahead for the franchise - for example, we created an Overwatch app right after its release because we think the game will be around for a long time.
If you’re interested in being considered for an app, the first thing you should do is make sure that you fill out your Mobile Main Page. Check out the Wikia Marvel app (Android and iOS) if you want an example of a good Mobile Main page - it’s concise, well-annotated, and highlights categories that users will want to access, like Characters and Comics.
And, of course, if you have suggestions on how to make apps better, please use Special:Contact to track us down.
Have you used our apps? Which did you enjoy? How can we improve them going forward? Let me know below.
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