This is not just related to the recent iOS 26 bug, which I’m aware of, but has been happening for a while.
The experience of using Discourse on iOS seems to be getting worse and worse. It used to be amazing when I first set up my forum in 2024, but it’s been getting progressively worse.
I recreated some of the issues on Meta so I know it’s not just my forum but here are some of the issues I have:
When scrolling large topics, the whole screen flickers (see video)
When scrolling UP in large topics, it jumps around and skips posts (see video)
When using a “Home Screen bookmark”, while composing a message or reply, after switching to a different app and back again, you can no longer use the toolbar buttons and the “post reply” button stops working. Have to quit the app and open again. This has been going on for a year. I’ll get a video of this.
The big one is of course the iOS 26 bug, no idea if that’s actually fixed in an upcoming release?
I know these issues aren’t just me, I have a moderator on my site who is stepping back and posting less because he is so frustrated with how it works on mobile. This is really damaging.
Here is a video of me scrolling from the bottom to the top of a topic on here.
The video is compressed but the flickering like mad is how it looks when you scroll! And as you can see on some of the page loads it jumps all over the place
I think a lot of these are the iOS26 bugs. On the iOS 26.1 public beta, things are significantly smoother. No flickering header, no non-responsive buttons, no sudden jumpy scrolling, etc.
Hopefully apple will release that update soon
For context: the bug causes the entire geometry of the page to be wrong from the javascript/css point of view. Things which are “at the bottom” are not actually at the bottom visually. When you tap something, the click event goes to the wrong element. And those problems have a knock-on effect to all sorts of things, including our infinite scrolling system for posts in a topic.
I have had this using the Discourse Hub app on iOS (currently 18.6.2) across multiple forums including Meta for months. It happens so frequently that I know exactly what to do without thinking. I used to worry that my draft might get lost but now I know it’ll be safe so I can quit the app without worrying.
Sometimes the edit/quote menu doesn’t show up at all. I think that coincides with when the reply button stops working, though it might be an extra thing.
I’ve seen this once or twice and would like to track it down… are you able to get this behavior consistently? I’ve tried a few ways to get it to reproduce the problem but it seems fairly random to me… if we can get consistent repro steps it would be much easier to fix (along with OS version)
No unfortunately it’s also maddeningly inconsistent. I have no idea what triggers it. But I know others get it too as we have talked about it together.
