Make the mobile website work well instead. Diff view is unusable, as are many other views. I'd much rather have a working web version than an app for GitHub (and almost all other services). Their UI is all document retrieval and matches the web model really well.
I'll echo this and the related/parent comments -- super common experience for me too. I WANT to use iOS Safari and frequently do -- I just wish their mobile web version was given more love/functionality versus being a stripped down version.
diff on mobile? you mean adapting a UI based on 80ish monospace characters to a screen that fits in your pocket?
I don't think anything is impossible but it almost seems we would have to code differently for that to be viable.
Out of curiosity I've checked out terminal apps for both Android and IOS (Termux and ISH) and I like them quite a bit but would never use them for anything serious. Try them out and how you feel about using them for real stuff - for me, the enthusiasm dwindled and I felt like waiting until I had access to a desktop.
There's lots of room for improvement but they should focus on the more social aspects of Github like Issues and pull request discussion.
Something as simple as simultaneous horizontal scrolling can go a long way with a side-by-side diff and that should be pretty damned simple in a browser.
Yes. I remember I read a guy on Twitter say he was part of a Github team focused on easy frontend wins and asking for suggestions. I'll let you know if I find it.
I regularly programming on my iphone using the blink shell[0] with an external keyboard. I'm actually more focus when programming on the phone instead of a desktop/laptop. However when any kinds of visualization are involved I immediately go to desktop
What version do Ipads use, desktop or mobile? If even only the smallest tablets used the mobile version I'd walk back my point. Diff review on tablets seem like a totally doable thing
Perhaps it's not possible to simply throw in a @media CSS sheet for mobile for an example like diff on a small screen.
I think bia3's point (maybe I'm wrong) is that it would be less buggy if it used the same underlying logic as github.com, but perhaps with a modified frontend (ie. m.github.com like the old days)
Is there actually a way to clone or download a repository in mobile view? I always have to switch to desktop view. I've searched everywhere for the clone/download button and have never been able to find it on mobile.
Well, you could say the same thing about most notifications including most emails, yet people presumably like notifications so much they'll get them delivered straight to their wrist watch.
I don't see how Github is much different in this regard. Besides, maybe you want the notifications while on the clock.
I'd rather get an app notification than an email notification for pretty much everything I can think of. I'd be surprised if I wasn't in the vast majority on this.
Well, if I can consolidate all my notifications to email, then only one application on my phone needs to have a constant/reoccurring connection to a server for push notifications. Instead of fifteen of the things all acting independently.
Benefit of using an app notification always would come down to platform specific experiences. But replying to github threads over email has been something that I don't have to think twice about
And I install one app per hundred sites that annoyingly prompt me to install their app so they can give me push notifications (or, worse, a working website because they didn't bother even trying to build their product as a website anymore because of the lack of push notifications; it is ridiculous). So? The site is going to prompt me either way. This argument makes no sense: of course I would rather get promoted for the one feature I don't want to give them instead of an attempt to upsell me on an entirely different experience after being served crippled content... that is a total no brainer.
To be honest, diff on mobile is a narrow use case. Also, given git's treatment of lines as atomic units of versioning, the data model didn't lend itself to mobile friendly views
I do a surprising amount of development on my phone these days. I was using GitHub's mobile website for this but I've recently started using Working Copy on iOS.
CI means I can even ship a change as a branch, open a pull request, wait for the tests to run and merge the branch.
Not being tethered to my laptop in order to ship small, safe changes is really nice.
Most of the maintenance involves making small changes that can be done even on a phone. E.g., if app is crashing because there is a piece of code which isn't doing array bounds checking, you can add that code quickly and push changes. Another example is small changes like fixing typos or changing labels.
I really wish they'd replace the commit feed with a PR comment feed. I honestly don't care who committed what. I don't need to know about it until I'm reviewing a PR. The unit of review is the PR, not the commit.
I need to know when there are new comments on PRs I'm participating in. I need to know when a PR of mine fails the build. I need to know when a review is posted.
I don't give a shit when someone else commits to the repo. It's noise, not signal.
I just add "-repo:org/repo-name" for the repos in my org I want removed from the results. Plus, it tells me what I need to review.
As long as you don't open email notifications about PR activity this page will show a blue indicator so you know which ones have been updated since you last viewed them.
Fully agreed. Weird that they dropped it then picked it back up again, though I'm guessing it's because it was dropped pre-MS and picked up as a part of MS. It'd be interesting to see an old link announcing it being dropped as context.
I've used Fasthub for Android before which was great. There is also a fully libre / FLOSS version that has the paid features added in (which you can do since the entire app is GPL). I remember a Github issue where the creator was mad about it, but well, if you pick GPL you should know what you're getting into.
GitHub has one of the better implementations of a separate mobile website.
- it's optimized for the smaller screen / touch interface
- it's provided for the majority of github's features
- it allows easily getting to the "full" desktop site
I'll probably continue to the website unless they stop development in favor of the app. What features do you really need an app for here? Or will this allow me to browse my repo offline?
I hate the GitHub mobile site. When I land there, I usually follow a link. What I see is part of the readme, and none of the links I’m used to (and want) from the desktop site. There is an option to always choose the desktop site, but guess where I’m logged in: On the desktop.
I absolutely abhor it. Instead of having responsive CSS to restyle everything, I have to go out of my way to request the desktop version where I can see everything, every single time.
The worst part is sometimes it doesn't render the full README. Some README's aren't useful till halfway through.
Even worse is when the they have been pages adaptive. There are features missing from pages solely based on your viewport width.
This is completely different from the mobile site, so if you leave the mobile site and land on one of these pages, there's just not much you can do but complain
Yup. And then it also missing the feature I want. Why not include everything? I don't get it. I'm always disappointed somehow when I _try_ to use their mobile site.
I couldn’t disagree more. The mobile version is absolutely terrible, because so much of what you are used to being able to do in a repo just doesn’t exist. You can’t even search issues.
It’s as if they see it as a separate product that they always deprioritize.
I like the mobile site as well, but it covers only maybe 20% of what you can do with GitHub. Where is the releases page??? The second most important page on most projects!! And there's many others missing. It's not like that part is just non-optimized - there's no link to it at all. Why do I still have to edit the URL to i.e. download an update for an app?
What's there is good, but most of it simply isn't there.
Indeed. And as someone that currently carries Windows Mobile and soon will hopefully be carrying a Linux phone, I'd really prefer if we have good web-based mobile experiences, focus sticks on those.
Relying on mobile apps made for specific platforms will always be arbitrarily limiting and enforce the duopoly.
As good as their mobile website is, it's still no replacement for an app with a local copy of the data, which is relatively easy for a git repos. Even if there isn't an offline mode, just having the whole repo cloned locally (bare or shallow) makes it a lot nicer to interact with the repo, simply from a UI latency perspective.
While editing code on my phone does not sound like fun, small things like being able to make branches, fix typos, submit to CI system will get used, for sure.
Mind you, there are git apps for iOS and Android, so there are other people out there that want access to their git repos via smartphone app.
I didn't even know they had a mobile site. Every time I view a link I apparently get the desktop site, which is the worst thing I've ever tried to use on my phone in my life (text in readmes cuts off and doesnt wrap etc)
I got an invitation to test the iOS app, but cannot use it because my account was flagged as spam [1], which is weird because I have a long record of reputable open-source contributions. The only suspicious thing I did in recent days was reporting several spammers in a public Gist that contains instructions on how to crack SublimeText which is clearly illegal. It seems that GitHub’s anti-spam system mistakingly flagged my profile just because I reported these accounts, and now I am unable to use my account for anything relevant.
Why would you want to crack Sublime Text anyway? The only things it does is shows (unregistered) in the title bar and pops up a nag dialog on saves (not sure the timing, maybe 4th save after launching). I didn't pay for a separate license for my lab pc, since I don't really tend to develop much at my electronics bench and mostly just need to occasionally check code.
Why would anyone want to bother cracking it? I can understand a student not being able to afford $70, but as-is there's no real loss of features. I just don't get it.
(edit) I thought I'd add, the reason I know it's useful w/o registering is that I got through school using ST. Bought a license with my first paycheck out of school.
> I didn't pay for a separate license for my lab pc, since I don't really tend to develop much at my electronics bench and mostly just need to occasionally check code
If you have a "named user" license, that license is good for every computer you use, including work and home, across Windows, Mac and Linux. There's AFAIK no limit to how many computers you can install and license it on using the same named user license.
Yeah, I don't put any eggs in that basket, as nice as GitHub is. When you need permission to exist on a platform, and they have no obligations to you, gotta be ready to lose it.
P.S. I just wish GitLab were more like GitHub. GitLab has always been more clumsy; don't differentiate on what's good about GitHub, GitLab has so much to offer.
I’m assuming the iOS app is based heavily on GitHawk (https://github.com/GitHawkApp/GitHawk) as its developer, Ryan Nystrom, moved to Github last year. Looking forward to getting in the beta!
Honestly, why wouldn't GitHub build a PWA version so the offline experience is fantastic. In fact, that's how Linus built Git. The saga is building app after app is getting ridiculous. It also frees developers to focus on building server-side functionality rather than 3x client app effort (web, iOS, android).
I've been waiting years for a mobile version of Github. I'm still on the beta waitlist to judge how good the working-version actually is, but at least the company is finally doing something to improve the mobile side.
So far, my go-to way of accessing Github on mobile is just Requesting Desktop Site from a mobile browser and dealing with it that way. I've tried a few of the third-party Github "mobile-version" apps, but they still don't beat just being able to go to "github.com" in Chrome/Safari on mobile and have what I want available to me directly from the source.
You can leave a comment-only review on the iOS beta that we released today, but we are committed to adding line-by-line commenting for Pull Request reviews before we launch broadly. I originally didn't think that it would work until our engineers built a prototype and changed my mind.
And since review comments are saved to the server as pending, you can even start a review on your phone, then finish on your computer (and vice versa).
I wonder if the apps are native or if they're using some cross-platform framework. I would assume Xamarin, but I could also see them using React Native because their desktop app is Electron and React.
There is some grousing[1] that a cross platform technology, including Microsoft's own Xamarin, wasn't used and that fully platform native development is a waste. Was it mentioned somewhere specifically (maybe during GH the keynote that I didn't watch) that SwiftUI was used? That would be the only way to square the tweeter's statement that only 20% of mobile users would be able to use it, he must mean only those on iOS 13, but not totally sure. Hightlighting Dark Mode and a good iPad version would play into SwiftUI's narrative but the framework still seems a bit new for an app of this caliber.
React native is an inferior product to IONIC when you want to have your own UX style which github probably want.
CSS is unmatched that's as simple as that.
Moreover, they would be able to reuse far more code.
This. Uninstalled all my MS work apps (for other reasons, mainly the fact that it gives work admins permission to nuke my entire phone), and now I have a proper cut-off time. Not necessarily 5-6PM, but when I decide it's over, it's over.
I don't mind going above and beyond under extreme circumstances. But I'm not letting a company take over my phone. They can provide me one in that case. And I'm still going to pay little attention to it after normal work hours.
Extremely important issues don't come up that frequently. So I'll be the judge of whether I need to deal with it now or it can wait and be on the docket first thing in the morning
This has been top-of-mind since we started on the app. We're heavy users of the app ourselves and are prioritized WLB features already. The last thing I want to see is our app used an excuse for people to work more. Instead, my hope is we can help people work more efficiently on their own terms.
How do you justify working on your phone as anything other than an invasion on your WLB?
What scenario do you anticipate people using this app? In the middle of meetings with other people? While driving? While sitting in the cafeteria on their lunch break?
I intend the app to be another option for how to get things done. I've been using it the last few months to manage building the app itself, and being a remote worker, it's freed me up to be a lot more mobile in where/how I do that work.
One of the most important next things we can build are more controls in when/how you can be reached (e.g. setting working hours).
