Four new languages

Version 1.7 of Omnipedia adds support for four more editions of Wikipedia: Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, and Russian. The app is also now fully localized in these languages, including separate localizations for both simplified and traditional Chinese and both Brazilian and European Portuguese.

If you are a regular user of Chinese Wikipedia, you may already know that article content is written in a mixture of simplified and traditional Chinese, which is dynamically converted to your preferred orthography when you view an article. To emulate this behavior in Omnipedia, we have integrated Open Chinese Convert (OpenCC), which will normalize articles into simplified or traditional Chinese (optionally with Hong Kong or Taiwan variants). If you prefer, you can also choose to keep articles in their original form without automatic conversion.

Version 1.7 also includes many minor improvements to all other localizations, including a British English variant and additional FAQ content.

We have also reduced the size of the app from 32 MB to 24 MB by offloading the language-specific machine learning models. The app now downloads only the models required depending on which libraries you have installed. (A small win, but still a point of pride for us!)

Quick note on incremental updates

The May snapshots are now available for download in the Omnipedia app. Unfortunately, due to some remaining compatibility issues with our new system, we are not yet ready to re-enable incremental updates this month. It is still possible to update to the new snapshots, but you will have to download the entire library rather than just the incremental changes.

We have already identified and fixed the root issue and we expect to restart incremental updates next month (June).

New parser

Over the past few months, we’ve been working on a ground-up rewrite of our article parser, which has three big benefits:

1. We can now extract Wikipedia article content more accurately, especially the parts of articles that are handled by Wikipedia’s complex templating system: things like dynamic unit conversions and live data retrieval.
2. We can now capture most tabular content, which is a huge win given that a lot of article content is presented in tables.
3. Going forward, the new parser will make it much easier for us to support more languages.

The April snapshots (the first ones built with the new parser) are now available for download in the Omnipedia app. As a result of the above improvements (particularly the addition of tables), you will find that the library sizes have increased by about 20%. For example, English Wikipedia has gone from 10 GB to 12 GB.

Unfortunately, in order to transition over to the new system, we have had to temporarily suspend incremental updates. This is due to some compatibility issues between the old and new archive formats. It is still possible to update to the new snapshots, but you will have to download the entire library rather than just the incremental changes. Incremental updates will resume next month.

Personal recommendations

Version 1.6 of Omnipedia is now available in the App Store with two new features.

First, the app can now recommend articles based partly on your reading history. As you read more articles, the app will gradually learn the things that you’re interested in and recommend related articles. Like everything else in Omnipedia, this feature works totally offline without any invasive tracking. The recommender algorithm also continues to mix in random recommendations as well so that you don’t get sucked down one particular rabbit hole. If you prefer, you can turn off history-based recommendations in the settings.

Secondly, after you perform an incremental library update, the app now shows the number of articles that were added, removed, and edited – just in case you were curious!

Version 1.6 also includes various other minor interface improvements.

New AI features

Version 1.5 of Omnipedia is now available in the App Store. This version includes two major new features.

First, we’ve added an article assistance feature that can help you answer questions about articles. When you open an article, you’ll find a new button to start an assistance session. You can then ask any questions you have about the article and (hopefully) get a useful response.

Under the hood, the article assistance feature uses Apple’s new Foundation Models API (essentially, an on-device large language model), and it works like an online chat assistant, except it’s entirely on-device and works fully offline. The feature can also pinpoint particular sections of the article that are relevant to your question.

Second, we have made several improvements to how Omnipedia recommends articles on the Explore screen. You will find new options to customize how the recommender algorithm works, and the app now uses on-device machine learning models to help classify and rank articles.

For each supported language, we have trained two custom models, a topic classifier and a content-safety classifier. The topic classifier allows us to identify the main topic of articles (history, sports, math, etc.), so that you can mute topics that you’re not interested in, while the content-safety classifier allows us to filter out articles of a sensitive nature from your recommendations (e.g., articles on terrorism or self-harm). Both of these features are optional and can be controlled in the settings.

Version 1.5 also includes many other minor improvements.

Changes to the update cycle

Since we launched last year, we’ve been tracking Wikipedia snapshots captured on the 20th of each month and releasing our updates around the 25th. However, the Wikimedia team has recently announced that they’ll now be releasing snapshots on just the 1st of the month going forward, so we will now be tracking those snapshots instead.

Over the coming months we will gradually transition to an earlier release cycle, with monthly updates available around the 5th of each month.

Now in Dutch and Italian

Omnipedia now supports two more languages, Dutch and Italian, bringing the number of supported languages to seven.

Version 1.4 also reintroduces the theme setting, with new theme colors that are better suited to the new Liquid Glass design language of iOS 26.

¡Hola!

Version 1.3 of Omnipedia adds full support for Spanish. We have also implemented support for the new background processing capability in iOS 26, which allows library downloads and updates to continue in the background while you are using other apps.

iOS 26 redesign

Version 1.2 of Omnipedia is now available on the App Store. This version includes a fairly extensive redesign for Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language in iOS 26.

While we’ve tried to keep the Omnipedia app familiar, we’ve simplified some parts of the interface to better align with the new design language. We have also removed the light- and dark-mode overrides in the article view, since these were causing visual inconsistencies in iOS 26.

Overall, we think the new design feels fresh and clean.

Automatic update checks

In version 1.1, the app now periodically checks to see if library updates are available, so you no longer have to check manually. If an update is available, a small red dot will appear on the settings icon to alert you.

Version 1.1 also includes various other minor efficiency and usability improvements.