Kiwix

Kiwix Team

About this app

Imagine being able to store the entirety of Wikipedia on your phone, and browsing it anytime, anywhere, even when there is no connectivity. Fully offline! For free!

Kiwix is a browser that downloads, stores and reads copies of your favourite educational websites - Wikipedia, TED talks, Stack Exchange, and thousands more in dozens of languages.

Note: Kiwix is also available on regular computers (Windows, Mac, Linux) as well as on Raspberry Pi hotspots - more info at kiwix.org. Kiwix is a non-profit and displays no ads nor collects any data. Only donations from happy users keep us going :-)

Ratings and reviews

Great when it works. Having offline access to some of the information you can download on here is useful for a multitude of situations. But many files are straight up incompatible with the app, near constant crashes when opening or switching between downloaded files, some don't open at all, and it could use filters to better search for files worth downloading. Ultimately a great idea, but it doesn't run well on my device at least (Google Pixel 6a). Would love to see some stability improvements.

After obtaining a new phone, I'm starting to suspect that the issues I previously had with this app we're related to either the phone I was using or the version of Android I was using. This one seems much better. It is stable, the download manager appears to function well and a stable, and the only criticism that I can think of is the fact that it sometimes takes quite a while to load a very large file like Wikipedia which is currently over 90GB.

Getting Kiwix to a usable point is time consuming and troublesome. I dug through the list and set it to download several wikis. The app seems to need to be in focus to download, downloads keep pausing, the app keeps crashing, and after three days in I finally only gotten one wiki - meanwhile it's constantly harassing new to rate the app. The app doesn't seem to take me to a list of wikis when I start it, it just dumps me into the first one I downloaded, and I have to dig into a menu to find the others. Not at all intuitive. Maybe it'll be different when I finally get a second wiki on here. It's an awesome premise! I can read and research when I'm in a dead zone, the internet is down or at camp. However, getting to that point drinking is a pain!

What's new

3.4.5
NEW: Supports Android 11
NEW: Hotspot socket address better visible, clickable and shareable
BUGFIX: Some zim-it files doesn't read anymore
BUGFIX: "Search in Kiwix" is just redirecting to Kiwix
BUGFIX: Laggy input in search box