In the midst of its ”Stop Online Piracy Act”/”E-PARASITE Act” (SOPA) and “The PROTECT IP Act” (PIPA) protest, WIkipedia, the most popular online encyclopedia released the Official WIkipedia App for Android.
As everybody know, WIkipedia offers free online encyclopedia reference with over 20 million articles in its repository and covers around 280 different languages. Now, after more than two years of waiting since the Wikipedia App for iOS came out in 2009, Android-based users can finally utilize the official Wikipedia App on their devices courtesy of Wikimedia Foundation. With the emergence of the officially released software, searching through Wikipedia’s vast resources just became simple and quick.
The Android App which right now is on Version 1.0, is guaranteed to work on all Android devices from Android 2.2 or Froyo up to the latest although we are yet to hear any feedback from those loaded with Ice Cream Sandwich. Some of the salient features that the app has include:
- Saving article to read later or offline;
- Searching for articles nearby;
- Sharing articles using Android “Share” function;
- Reading of article/s in a different language; and
- Full screen search
According to the developer, one of the highlights of the app is the inclusion of location-based feature which can prove to be particularly useful when making searches that concerns places or locations.
The Wikipedia App is available for free just like its iOS and mobile counterpart. While looking at some of the reviews and feedback from those who tried and tested the app, we have seen a lot of happy users. With merely 558kb in size, it should take very little time to download and install. Having been released just a few days ago, the app already falls within the 100,000 to 500,000 installs range. Notably, it just goes to show how Android users have been eagerly waiting for this software.
The app still leaves a lot of room for improvement in terms of UI and other functionalities but knowing WIkipedia, we assume that the team is already working on them. Click the link to download the App from the Android Market.