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by dochtman·6y ago·view on hn ↗
I've been using betas for the Android app, but in my experience there's still a lot of paper cuts here.

For example, I do quite a few code reviews on my Pixel 2, but what drives me crazy is that the lines in the diffs wrap! On top of that, the code font it uses is pretty large, so wrapping happens often and makes reviewing much harder.

The support for per-commit code review (which is only so-so in the desktop web experience) is even harder to use on mobile.

The main activity feed from / is nowhere to be seen, even though this is something I use daily on my laptops (long-standing pet peeve, since this is also non-existent in the mobile web view).

If you follow a link to particular issue comment (for example, from the bottom of a notification email), the Android app will just land you at the top of the issue.

So, having the app is an improvement over the mobile web experience (particularly since the PR review approval button was impossible to hit in the mobile web view without zooming), but IMO there's still a lot to be done here, and I hope they keep executing on it.

4 comments
Really good feedback, I feel you on the text wrapping. We're trying to find creative ways to make this work better.

> The main activity feed from / is nowhere to be seen, even though this is something I use daily on my laptops

Can you tell me more about what you use this feed for? You're talking about the one on the github.com home page?

Again thanks for the feedback, we have a lot of work to do still! Forwarding this comment to the team.

I feel for text wrapping, letting it simply flow off the device screen works well in this UX scenario because all of these devices should be expected to be multi-touch enabled. It is very intuitive for a mobile device user to swipe left/right in order to scroll content that is obviously clipped by the screen dimensions. Swiping left/right and pinching to zoom are the very first things I tried when reviewing a PR. I feel if you could support some approach where the text item is displayed at full scale always (no line break/wrapping), and the user can basically treat the view like they would an image (pinch-to-zoom/pan).

Additionally, perhaps the code review process on mobile could be somewhat different from the desktop experience. Instead of trying to display the full diff all at once for a file, perhaps you aggregate the diff regions, and then display those one-at-a-time. Sort of like a tinder for code reviews. Swipe left on a diff region for deeper review, swipe right for approval. Lots of cool stuff you can do if you fully-leverage the mobile device environment and related user knowledge.

BTW, I love the direction all of this is headed in. Keep up the great work.

Tinder UI idea is very smart - that’s a great idea!
I too use the feed or homepage. Mostly for discovery of repos from people I follow and getting notifications about who starred which of my repositories. I do miss that in the app. Otherwise I love it so far.
Yes I have to say, this is fast becoming one of my favourite ways to discover new repos. It attracts developers who might not be the most vocal on traditional forms of social media but otherwise have something worth visiting.
As the sibling comment says, horizontal scrolling would be an improvement over the status quo. Pinch to zoom would be another nice win.

> Can you tell me more about what you use this feed for? You're talking about the one on the github.com home page?

Yes, that's the one I'm talking about. I use it to see who's starring repos I'm involved in, who's following me, and what the developers I follow are starring (the feed also has stuff about what people are pushing to repos I watch, but that is not interesting to me because I usually keep track of it by following PRs or issues). Just keeping track of what's going on in the world.

Also, now that I have your attention, please please read https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2020/01/07/problems-with-pull-... and make life better for those experienced engineers who do per-commit reviews.

Finally, I found the feedback handling from the betas somewhat discouraging. At least when I tried it, it just emailed off and there was no follow-up at all. If that process was a bit more conducive, I might have given you this feedback sooner.

When I really have to use GitHub on mobile, I usually use the browser in desktop mode.
How can I trick it into thinking I'm on desktop. Firefox's (for iOS) "Request Desktop Site" button doesn't work for me.
There should be a link in the footer that changes it to the desktop version.
it stopped working for me. I suspect they have made the website responsive now.
I've often used it, but just checked and now it doesn't work.They have improved the UX, pray they do not improve it any further.

I don't want to have an account (because they want email), so it looks like this is the end of github for me.

EDIT: in android firefox, I found the "Request Desktop Site" works (on a code page) e.g. https://github.com/termux/termux-app There is also a desktop link in the footer, but it doesn't work.

WARNING: If I try the desktop link and then "Request Desktop Site", I get to https://github.com/site/mobile_preference (a 404). Starting fresh and just doing "Request Desktop Site" works.

I saw there's now an option in Github user settings which allows you to mark your entire account as always serving desktop pages when you're on mobile.

Ironically, can't dig up the link on mobile since I've not yet clicked that button.

https://github.com/settings/admin

"Mobile settings" [ ] Opt out of mobile pages This will cause all your sessions and devices to only experience the desktop site for all pages. Pages designed to be responsive will still scale down properly.

ooof, I need to toggle a setting temporarily every time I want to set a label. FUCK.
Doesn’t GitHub itself give you an option to switch to desktop?
> The main activity feed from / is nowhere to be seen, even though this is something I use daily on my laptops

Same thing here. I’m mostly using CodeHub on iOS, but if GH adds the feed, I’m probably switching over to their app.

This also reeeally needs code search.