Case Study: Wikimedia Foundation rapidly delivers a widely adopted mobile app with Adobe PhoneGap

Wikimedia uses Adobe PhoneGap to rapidly deliver its first mobile app, honoring its pledge to the future of open mobile web standards

The Wikimedia Foundation, steward of Wikipedia, needed to quickly meet a rapidly growing mobile audience while staying true to its commitment to open source and open web standards. The challenge was to deliver engaging, multilingual mobile experiences cost‑effectively across platforms and to increase both consumption and contribution without fragmenting development across proprietary SDKs.

Wikimedia turned to Adobe PhoneGap to build a cross‑platform HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript app framework; a three‑developer team built and deployed the Android app in under three months and followed with an iOS test build. The PhoneGap approach accelerated development and contributor participation, enabled wide localization (complete for 25 languages, near‑complete for 50+, translatable to 250+), and produced strong market results—#1 Wikipedia search result on Android, millions of installs (about 2.3M in the first three months and ~2.6M total) and a 74% install retention rate.

Wikimedia Foundation

Tomasz Finc

Director of Mobile and Special Projects, Wikimedia Foundation