Notes on device compatibility:

How to test:

• log in and go to Special:Upload on a wiki in the device's browser (the full UI, not the mobilefrontend!)
• check whether the upload selector (<input type="file">) is grayed out or functional
• check to confirm you can get to camera / photo gallery and select an item
• check if a thumbnail is displayed after selecting (if so, you have FileAPI and will support chunked/restartable uploads)

We don't currently have any support for the more advanced HTML Media Capture facilities (bug 31978) so there's not a handy test for them.

Firefox:

• Firefox 8 on Android: A+
  • supports photo picker, music track, and sound recorder for <input type="file"> (can get to Camera via Gallery).
  • includes full FileAPI

Android stock Browser:

• Android <= 2.2: unknown?

• Android 2.3.6: B
  • <input type="file"> supports Gallery etc like Firefox does.
  • Does not appear to include FileAPI support -- must upload in one POST through the form.

• Android 3.0, 4.0 - untested, but theoretical A+
  • claims to support HTML Media Capture (bug 31978) which is a superset of <input type="file"> and FileAPI
  • FileAPI for chunked uploads *should* work
  • may or may not be able to do video capture directly

Safari:

• Safari iOS 4.3, 5: F
  • no <input type="file"> support at all as of iOS 5. (Appears as grayed out.)

Opera Mobile:

• 11.50 on Android 2.3.6: C
  • <input type="file"> works, but shows a low-level file picker on /mnt/sdcard. Very bad UI! You can select files from your camera gallery but need to know the filename.
  • supports FileAPI, can show thumbnails

PhoneGap extends direct camera support for apps built using it, so the app for iOS should be able to upload by using that interface and feeding data into the upload API.

philinje wrote:

Thanks, Brion, what a great list. Just to be clear, does PhoneGap allow file selection from the native gallery as well as camera support?

Update: iOS 6 is coming out soon and adds <input type="file"> and FileAPI support in the browser. Special:Upload and UploadWizard work in desktop view.

Opera Mini on iOS also seems to allow file uploads, using the image gallery picker. No FileAPI support there that I can see (very limited JS in Opera Mini).

I'm a bit confused about how this fits in to the big picture. Sure we want uploads and can on certain browsers but the user needs a path to upload. Is this a link to an upload page or is this more focused - e.g. a button saying 'add photo here' or 'add attachment'

We probably want to tackle this as part of an effort to upload photos into articles? Can someone create a story which captures a use case for this in mingle? Thanks.

I'll take the this since it was my original bug https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/mobile/cards/169