Kiwix is an offline reader for Web content. One of its main purposes is to make Wikipedia available offline. This is done by reading the content of a file in the ZIM format, a highly compressed open format with additional metadata.
This is the version for Android, with support versions ranging from 7 to 13 (like mentioned here).
Important Note: Starting from Android 11, the ZIM file picker
feature has been restricted in the Play Store variant due to Play
Store policies. This means that users running Android 11 and above
will not be able to load ZIM files from internal/external storage
directly within the app if they have downloaded Kiwix from the Google
Play Store. This restriction is in place to comply with the Play
Store policies. The Play Store variant of Kiwix does not require the
MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission anymore, which is necessary to
scan storage and access ZIM files at arbitrary locations. Therefore,
the storage scanning & file picking functionalities are not available
in this variant anymore. To use the full version of Kiwix and benefit
of the ZIM file picker feature, you can download it directly from the
official
repository or use
F-Droid. We understand that this
restriction may cause inconvenience, but it is necessary to comply
with the Play Store policies and ensure a smooth user experience. We
recommend using the official version of the app available on our
website to access the complete set of features.
Kiwix Android is written in Kotlin
Production releases of the app are built on travis and released automatically
To build this repository alone for development purposes you can simply
import the project into Android Studio and the hard work will be done
for you. Note here that instead of opening the project, you have to import it. If you prefer to build without Android Studio you must first
set up the Android SDK and then run the command: ./gradlew build
from the root directory of the project.
Kiwix-Android is a multi-module project, in 99% of scenarios you will want to build the app module in the debug configuration.
If you are interested in our custom apps they have their own repo kiwix-android-custom that goes into further detail
- Libkiwix - Kotlin/Java binding for the core Kiwix library
- Dagger 2 - A fast dependency injector for Android and Java
- Retrofit - Retrofit turns your REST API into a Java interface
- OkHttp - An HTTP+SPDY client for Android and Java applications
- Butterknife - View "injection" library for Android
- Mockito - Most popular Mocking framework for unit tests written in Java
- RxJava - Reactive Extensions for the JVM – a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences for the Java VM.
- ObjectBox - Reactive NoSQL Database
- MockK - Kotlin mocking library that allows mocking of final classes by default.
- JUnit5 - The next generation of JUnit
- AssertJ - Fluent assertions for test code
- Fetch - A customizable file download manager library for Android
Before contributing be sure to check out the CONTRIBUTION guidelines.
We currently have a series of automated Unit and Integration tests. These can be run locally and are also run when submitting a pull request.
Available communication channels:
- Web Public Chat channel
- Mailing list
- Slack: #android channel Get an invite
- IRC: #kiwix on irc.freenode.net
For more information, please refer to https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication.