Last week, we added two cornerstone esports to the Liquipedia mobile app—StarCraft 2 and Brood War—making it the esports information app with the largest number of games covered.
What is the Liquipedia App?
If you're reading this, chances are you're plenty familiar with how to browse the Liquipedia website on your computer or mobile web browser. You might be wondering, why does Liquipedia need a dedicated mobile app?
The answer is, there were many requested features and specific use cases that we couldn't adequately address through the website. Overall, the app helps us better achieve the following three goals:
- Make sure users never miss a match: Achieved through a notification system that works on tournament, player, team, and even match level.
- Deliver tailored, at-a-glance updates for individual users: Achieved through a Home screen that takes into account what games, teams, and players the user favorites and follows.
- Reach the non-English speaking community: Achieved through localization efforts by the Liquipedia community. We currently support 12 different languages.
Current App Features
Let's go into some more detail on the features of the Liquipedia App.
13 (+2) games available: Apart from StarCraft 2 and Brood War, the app also covers Dota 2, VALORANT, Counter-Strike, Rocket League, League of Legends, Mobile Legends, Rainbow Six, Overwatch, Arena of Valor, Brawl Stars and Wild Rift. WarCraft 3 and FIFA are currently in beta testing.
A system to follow/favorite specific teams, players, and tournaments: This makes sure that you don’t miss matches or updates from your favorite teams, players, or tournaments. All of these updates are delivered in a streamlined fashion through the…
Personal Home screen: The Home screen lists Live, Upcoming and Completed matches and tournaments according to your tagged interests. Our goal was to create a feature that works well for all kinds of esports fans, whether you follow just one player in one game, or have interests spanning multiple genres. If you are a fan of Serral, but also Team Liquid’s Dota 2 team, but also want to watch the CS2 Major, you no longer need to hop through three different Liquipedia categories to get updates.
Notification system: You can enable push notifications for tournaments, teams, and players (and even for specific matches so that you don’t get spoiled for the TI grand final). You will be reminded when a match is starting, has ended, or is being delayed.
Localization: We’re working closely with the Liquipedia community to localize the app in as many languages as we can. Currently, we support 12 languages, including Brazilian/Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Japanese, and Dutch.
Tournament pages: Giving you all the important info about a tournament at a glance, including standings and brackets, participants, schedule and results, prize pools, streams, etc.
Discover screen: If you prefer a more web-like experience, the Discover pages give you an overview of what’s going on in each game – featured events, trending pages, and a detailed tournament list. You can add/remove which games you want to see there too, so you have one-tap access to all your favorite games.
Ad-free subscription: Gets rid of the ads, supporting the Liquipedia team in the best way possible <3
The entire app team is also active on the Liquipedia Discord. We are always there to respond to feedback or bug reports, do frequent user polls about what you want to see in the app, and share development of upcoming features.
Which brings us to…
Upcoming features for the Liquipedia app
This year, we’re looking to update the app with:
Spoiler-free mode: We’ve had this request many times (for web included) and the app is getting it as soon as this month, it’s already in beta!
New match pages: Equipped with visual redesign while adding game data (drafts, maps), standings and brackets info, streams, VODs, the whole nine yards!
Tournament series pages: Follow an entire series of tournaments so you subscribe to all of their events in perpetuity, a set-and-forget feature so you don’t have to remember to log in to follow the new GSL season.
New player and team pages: Visual redesign and improved functionality to tell you what and where are your favorites playing next, how they’ve performed recently, what they’ve achieved historically, and so on!
More games: We have WarCraft 3 and FIFA currently in beta testing, and we’ll be adding Stormgate as soon as it gets promoted to main wiki. The end goal is to have all main wikis available in the app sooner or later.
More languages: Each month, we get more and more contributors interested in helping with localization in their language. We’re currently working on Spanish and exploring options for Chinese and Korean. If you want to help, stop by the Liquipedia Discord in the #app-localization channel and we’ll give you the warmest welcome <3
How does the Liquipedia app work? AKA "why is this missing?"
All data in the app comes from Liquipedia’s database (LPDB), which in turn is updated primarily through the efforts of the Liquipedia community. We’re constantly adding new features, getting closer to the richness of Liquipedia web with each month, with the end goal being to bring all the information to the app in some form.
If there’s a web feature or a wiki/game currently missing in the app, it’s likely a result of one of two things:
- The data for it needs to undergo standardization so it can be sent to the app (which is the case with a lot of games).
- We just haven’t gotten to it yet in terms of designing the app solution for it.
Closing remarks
We appreciate everyone who supported the development of the app through thick and thin, and who have worked with us as we’ve improved it piece by piece. We can’t wait to bring you more features in this and the coming years and if you have any questions about the project or would like to share your thoughts, just leave us a comment!
Lastly we’d like to take this opportunity to give our thanks to all the wonderful volunteer contributors of the wikis, any update in the app is done by a volunteer on Liquipedia which keeps it being the amazing resource that it is. A big thanks also goes to HJPAlpha for his tireless work with improving the code quality of Liquipedia (but especially for StarCraft II), enabling us to add richer data for both SC2 and BW to our API and app.