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.
Ok, here’s hoping, but I’ve definitely been experiencing these issues, especially the one where it jumps out of place as you scroll, for a long time not just since iOS 26.
There is some confusion about the versions. 26.0.1, which was released publicly, does not fix any of these problems. 26.1, currently in beta, seems to fix most things.
That said, I’m sure you’re right that there are other bugs. Discourse isn’t perfect. But it’s very hard to separate them from the OS bugs when testing on iOS 26.0.
Right now, I believe it is the better experience. Hope they merge it soon.
I’m really not convinced by Apple’s quality lately.
Even on stable 18.6, I was recently struck by how hard it was to develop for Safari compared to Android Chrome. Safari was often flickering where Chrome was rock steady.
I think this is one of the reasons why many people are moving to Pixel and equivalent. I appreciate that still leaves a lot of Apple users for which one needs to optimise in any case.
