Chat Doesn't Work on IPads / Other Devices in Landscape

A few users have reported that they are unable to use Chat on iPad,Samsung Fold and other devices.

Testing this out: everything works fine on iPad in portrait as channels appear on the left pane and the current channel or DM is on the right pane.

If you turn the device to landscape however, you only see the right pane and there is no UI available to leave the channel (unlike on mobile where there is a back arrow at the top with the channel name).

Many (most?) iPads are used in landscape so this is problematic.

Possible solutions:

  • Can a back arrow be added for iPads in landscape?
  • Alternately if mobile styles could be forced somehow that would work too

Any help greatly appreciated.


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10gen, latest iPadOS and DiscourseHub

Can you please show how it looks on Safari?

None of our users are on Discourse Hub and would guess it makes up a pretty small % of users for most sites.

Totally same.

Not sure what to tell you… this is me using chat on meta.discourse.org on an iPad Mini with latest OS. Others are using full size iPads and other devices.

The screenshots don’t lie. There is no way to leave a channel or DM once you’ve joined in landscape as there is no left rail or back arrow at the top near the channel name.


Perhaps you would like to try setting Chat separate sidebar mode?

Because even here the layout is same as I showed — but sure, when one have small screen, like mini or is using the sidebar of Safari, the sidebar here doesn’t stay open.

I’m not sure if this is a bug, but more like UX

I can’t repro the problems either but let’s try the obvious one first:

If the above screenshot is from a tablet, then it seems that you are using the desktop version, which could explain the situation on certain devices/viewports. Can you click the little mobile icon and see if this resolves your issues?

@Earnie_Baird are you sure you are not using desktop version on mobile?

Safari on latest iOS

Landscape:

Portrait:

Yes @joffreyjaffeux - I am sure desktop is not being used on mobile. On mobile for my discourse site I am using the wonderful Chat Bubbles component by @chapoi and it works flawlessly on phones.

The issue is that iPad always gets desktop and not mobile (as you’ll also see in my screenshot for this site). I wish there were a way to force either iPad or devices in landscape to use mobile but I can’t figure out how to do that.

also @chapoi - to answer your question above, when people use iPad in landscape they never see that entire left rail in order to click on that little mobile icon (see my screenshot above).

It’s annoying that for some reason it defaults to desktop view, but they should still be able to open the sidebar via the menu icon top right, and then find the little mobile icon again at the bottom.

So I got my hands on a larger iPad and it works as shown on the screenshots above with the left rail/nav properly showing in landscape mode.

The problem is if the screen is not wide enough (iPad mini, Samsung Fold, etc.) it just cuts off the left rail.

Ideally at that break point it would automatically switch to a mobile layout.

There’s basically this subset of devices bigger than a phone but smaller than a regular size tablet where it just doesnt work correctly.

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