Discourse jumping 20 posts up when going back to PWA

AI-generated summary

In a bug report regarding Discourse PWA behavior, vincefrommtl described an issue where navigating back to the app causes the view to jump approximately 20 posts up or down, affecting both topic lists and specific discussions. This occurred on Android 16 with Chrome 144 after external link interactions or app switching, but not when using the standard web browser. asc confirmed experiencing the same issue on their self-hosted instance and Meta. awesomerobot requested device specifics, while pmusaraj noted they could not reproduce it on Android 14 and suggested past similar issues were mostly iOS-related. After further testing, vincefrommtl reported that the problem was intermittent and seemed to resolve after restarting the PWA. Ultimately, the issue became difficult to replicate; vincefrommtl observed that the official Meta PWA functioned correctly, leading them to suspect a conflict with their custom theme or plugins rather than a core Discourse bug. pmusaraj thanked the user for the investigation and invited further reports if the issue reappears.

Hello,

We just did an update of Discourse this weekend (2026.1.0-latest). I observed that, sometimes, when using our forum installed as a PWA with Chrome, going out of the app and back in will jump conversations 20 posts up.

This is happening when, for example, clicking a link to an external site and going back to the forum, switching apps, or using the back button.

This is also happening on topic lists, going back to the PWA will sometimes restore the wrong position.

I haven’t seen this when using the forum directly on the web browser, but I did not test it a lot.

Everything else is working fine. Clicking on conversations will go to the right place, direct link to specific messages are going where they should.

Thanks

2 Likes

I’m also getting this on my self hosted install and here on Meta.

3 Likes

Thanks for reporting this, can you let us know if you’re on Android or iOS and which version?

This is on Android 16, with Chrome 144.

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I’m on Android 14, Chrome 144

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I’m not able to reproduce on Android 14, Chrome 144. Are there any specific steps that reproduce the problem every single time?

We’ve had similar “page scrolls up 20 posts” in the past, mostly on iOS, though.

A simple way for me is to go on a discussion with an external link, click on it to open in a Custom Tabs, and going back to the forum.

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After a few days of testing, here is some precisions:

When opening the PWA, things are working well for a while. When the problem happens, I have to close and restart the PWA to make it go away.

Also, it’s not only jumping up, it can jump down. Topics lists are affected too.

2 Likes

Ah, so the issue only happens after some minutes of use? How many would you say, 20-30 minutes of consistent use of the PWA?

Do you have any custom themes/plugins on your instance? And also… can you reproduce on the meta.discourse.org PWA?

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Now, I’m having a hard time replicating the issue :laughing:

I’m trying to pay attention to my action on the forum and see what is triggering the jump, but for the past day, I have not seen anything. Maybe Chrome was the problem ?

I tried the official PWA, and it’s going fine, also.

I don’t want to waste your time for the moment, I will keep an eye for this issue on my end, and make test with our theme components and plugins if it shows up again. Thanks :slight_smile:

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All good, no worries. If it shows up again, don’t hesitate to post more details here. Thanks for testing!

3 Likes