[talk-ph] Wikipedia mobile app now uses OSM

Eugene Alvin Villar seav80 at gmail.com
Fri Apr 6 20:28:28 BST 2012


Hi everyone,

The Wikimedia Foundation has just released new versions of their
Wikipedia app for iOS and Android. One big change to the app is that
they have switched to using OpenStreetMap (using the MapQuest Open
tileset served via Leaflet, but Wikimedia plans to use its own tiles
in the future) instead of Google Maps. Blog post here:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/05/new-wikipedia-app-for-ios-and-an-update-for-our-android-app/

This switch is not for economic reasons (since Google currently does
not charge app developers for Google Maps for mobile), but for
idealogical reasons (Wikipedia is about open data/knowledge after
all), and also since the map feature can now be viewed on more Android
phones especially those that do not have Google Maps Mobile built in.

2012 is looking to be the year of OpenStreetMap. :)



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