If you’re one of the 14,000 or so marvellous mobile folks who use our Android app then you might be wondering where the hell we’ve gone.
For almost a week now our dedicated Android app has not been loading new articles.
Whilst we’re figuring out of the cause of the issue (rather aptly it broke on SOPA strike day) we’ve pulled the app from the Android Market.
This means that if you haven’t downloaded it already you won’t be able to get it until we’ve fixed things up and re-published it.
The bad news is that we have no idea how long this will be.
Mobile site Vs App
The OMG! Ubuntu! Android application was created for us by Daniel Nadeau, a natty reader who offered to build us the application as a way of flexing his development skills on Android. We open-sourced the code for the application in August of last year.
Annoyingly the launch of an Android app had an unfortunate side effect on mobile web users.
Because of the way it ‘scraped’ data from the site having the ‘mobile’ version of the site enabled would break the app. This has mean that since the launch of the app in May opening OMG! Ubuntu! in a mobile browser has been a little bit frustrating.
The ‘good news’ for anyone whose data plans have baulked at the size of the site on 3G is that we’ll be relaunching a ‘mobile’ version of the site in the coming days to offset the hole left by the Android app. We’ll give you an update when it’s live.
But whilst the Android app is out of action it might time to start thinking about creating a new and improved version.
We’d love to see your mock-ups, designs, suggestions – and even code! Share your thoughts in the comments below or send us a mail at contact [at] omgubuntu.co.uk.