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Comment by smackfu | Hacker News Reader

I've tried a few Wikipedia apps... I always end up not using them since I find Wikipedia pages via Google and there is no way to redirect you from the web to an app. (Wikipedia could choose to do it on their end but they don't.)

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Why would Wikipedia want to redirect to an unofficial application?

I meant that it could technically be done but only from the Wikipedia side, not that they have any motive to do it.

How is Wikipedia supposed to know you'd like to be redirected to some random app downloaded from an app store?

There actually is a way to redirect from the web to a random app (intents on Android) but that's not available on iOS. Lay the blame at Apple's feet not Wikipedia's.

It could be in a cookie Wikipedia looks at. You specify the name of the app you want to launch in the cookie, then the site redirects you to that app.

It is available on iOS, for instance Quora pages you open in Mobile Safari will have a link to open in the Quora app. But it has to be provided by the site working together with the app.

Details: http://mobiledevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-appl...

MediaWiki/Wikipedia has a skin feature where a user can set their own custom user-specific JS to be added to each page. (Think of it as a server-side Greasemonkey or auto-triggered-bookmarklet.) See...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:User_style#JavaScript

...and the 'Custom JavaScript' links of...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsect...

I suspect you could use this to implement a bounce-to-other-app-via-URL-handler mechanism, for any logged-in user who could be coached to cut&paste the right Javascript into the right place.

We were thinking about working on a bookmarklet to make the Safari > Wikiweb (or another Wikipedia app that has a url scheme) transition easier.

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