Discourse Mobile: chat improvements, notifications, widget

After the release of the chat functionality, I think that Discourse Mobile needs some improvements to make it “comparable” to other platform apps for ordinary people (in Germany, roughly 69% of the users on the internet use mobile devices). Questions:

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discourse’s mobile mode is terrible, the buttons are at the top, it’s very bad to use your thumb to touch the buttons, it had to be the bottom button, like on the iphone, there are a lot of things that are not usual

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I also think that some work on the mobile platform is needed as 2/3 of the people on the internet use mobile devices …

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Well, in Finland at more general type platforms mobile users are covering 90 % or more. And I’m quite sure the situation is same at all Nordic countries.

The most alarming thing is the most of mobile users are used to bad user experience.

I kind of hate to say this at loud, but the biggest issues here are coders working with big multi screens. Even here we can find a lot topics where everyone are worrying how two or three sidebars are done :wink: The majority of themes are planned to 21 inch screens. I’ve lifted the cat on the table, of showing the well known elephant on living room, saying that I’m counting every theme, component or plugin that is big screen only as a broken one. That isn’t liked too much :wink:

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I am reading this and replying on my iPhone so :man_shrugging:

What specially is being asked here?

To answer point 1 in the op, yes we are always testing and improving mobile

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That’s nice. I’m using iPad right now. So indeed?

You aren’t suggesting that easiness, or UX in full, is on/off question and capability to do basic things is equal than good UX, are you?

I don’t know, but perhaps OP will open that queston more. I’m doing general meta-conversation and from my point of view feature is wrong category now.

Well, my question was simple and “feature-related”, therefore the category should be fine.

  • are there any planned improvements for Discourse Mobile concerning the Discourse chat functionality and android notifications? (example: there are no notifications at all on android)
  • is someone working on implementing a widget for the android app?

From the “android perspective” it looks as if the app needs some “overhauling” or feature updates. But this may be my personal picture for the android part of the code. I can see on github that @pmusaraj is working frequently on the code …

@Jagster I understand the global discussion about “UX for mobile devices”, but this should be discussed in a separate thread.

I think Discourse works well on the iPhone. Is it very different on Android?

We have full support for Web Push notifications. I rely on Discourse Chat notifications as part of my job, and they work reliably on my phone and are even mirrored on my smartwatch.

Do you have the instance you use installed as a PWA on your device? That’s step one for heavy usage of an instance, and we prompt every active user for it.

Widgets for PWA are coming in the near future, as the spec is being developed by Microsoft in the Chromium project. I’m keeping an eye for it and will work on it as soon as it’s available as we did with every other PWA feature.

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Hm, thats the version available in the Google Play App Store in Germany.

I don’t think that this is a PWA app? App version info is 1.8.7
notifications are definitely allowed, but I dont see any when there are new messages on meta.discourse org or my own instance forum.netzwissen.de

Enough to be somekind pain for development.

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