So … I’ve been using the mobile app on my phone because it was a little easier to navigate in it than in my phone’s browser. A little easier to quote, and to bounce between sites.
I just “upgraded” the app, and now it seems to literally dump me into the browser. In addition to the navigation issues i didn’t like in the browser, it also seems to have become super slow. I hit “reply” and nothing happens. Eventually, several seconds later, the reply window opens up.
Also, if i select a chunk of text, the phone wants to treat it as editing a page (copy, paste, etc ) and that menu covers enough of the Discourse menu (quote, and weirdly, edit) that it’s really really hard to trigger the discourse menu. And even if i do, the response is painfully slow.
I don’t know if the speed is related to dumping me into the browser, or is an unrelated problem. When i previously played with both my default browser and the app package of it, i don’t recall the browser being painfully slow.
But whatever is going on, it’s become really hard to interact with this site on my phone. I can read a thread okay, and starting this thread was okay. But replying to an existing thread is painful.
The Discourse app. It’s always packaged the web browser, but it used to show Discourse in its own window on my phone, and navigate cleanly. It also avoided ugly stuff like the interaction between the browser thinking I want to copy text and the Discourse “quote this piece” button. Whereas now it literally opens a new page in my browser (Firefox for Android), and if I want to quote a section of a post, it can take repeated clicking, because the “quote” button" is mostly underneath the “edit this piece of text” browser interface. And it’s become glacially slow to respond.
What’s weird is that it’s worse than “just use the browser” used to be. I don’t remember the browser being this laggy, for instance. I tried just using the browser directly, and it’s still super laggy, to the point where responding to any post is painful. So it might be two separate changes. I stopped using the browser directly quite a while ago, as I found the interface of the “app” easier to use.
It has really become a horrible mobile experience. Since I spend 90% of my “chat site” time on my phone, it’s made the site hard to cope with.
(this was typed on a laptop.)
I would post s screenshot, but (1) I don’t want to fight with the interface and (2) this site doesn’t host images.
I didn’t know there was a ‘Discourse’ app—searching around now, I see a ‘DiscourseHub’, is that the one you’re talking about? At least, there, the first review is that it’s become useless since it now opens forums in the browser…
What I’ve been doing on the phone is to just save the forum link on my home screen on my phone. This basically opens it in Chrome when tapping, but doesn’t show the Chrome navigation bar, and doesn’t mix it up with my gazillion other open Chrome tabs I swear I’m going to get around to reading eventually. Performance-wise, I haven’t had any issues, but mostly use the desktop when writing, anyway.
Naw, the app used to behave very differently from the browser.
As I said above, I used Android Firefox. I think it’s a fairly common choice, and in general, it works fine. For literally everything else, i’ve been happy with it. Discourse is not the only thing I use my phone for.
None of that contradicts what I said. Given what you have described, it seems that the app you are talking about is the webapp. Installed webapps essentially run in a special mode of your web browser that looks like a separate app, but actually runs that web browser under the hood.
Firefox has recently decided to stop supporting webapps, which would explain why the app now loads directly in Firefox. And Firefox also recently updated, which could explain why Discourse runs worse in it than it ever did before. As @Darren_Garrison has said, Android Firefox and the SDMB don’t play nicely together. I personally disabled automatic updating for Android Firefox to keep it from constantly breaking.
Android Firefox’s quality dropped significantly just after Mozilla had to lay off a huge portion of their staff. Not soon after, they released an overhaul of how Firefox works. And that version has been having problems with Discourse since it came out.
I am not suggesting you change your web browser. I’m suggesting you install a separate browser to use just for the SDMB—at least, until we get this all fixed. That way you can still mod while we try to get to the bottom of the issue. It may take a while.
I’m curious who “we” is in your sentence. Do you work for Firefox?
Anyway, i decided you were right, and it’s reasonable for me to replace the “discourse app” with the “chrome app” for interacting with discourse, and you are also right that it’s a huge upgrade with respect to interacting with the SDMB on my phone. I still prefer some of the old interface of the Discourse app, but using Discourse in Android Chrome is acceptable. No weird lag, no nasty interaction between Discourse’s Quote feature and the browser’s “edit text” feature.
The app is a wrapper over the native system browser with some additional functionality.
Thus, most of its behavior is determined by the native web browser on your device. I’d say update both your OS and browser to latest versions and see if that helps?
Well, we generally support latest versions, so hopefully it is a minor regression in a browser or OS release? I know I saw a weird iOS issue that went away when I updated, recently.
That makes sense. This isn’t the first time I’ve had an app for when i updated it, so I’m often cautious about updates. I want expecting this one too be a big deal, though.
BigT suggests the problem may have been that I updated Firefox, though. Which i don’t remember doing, but i might have, as i had decided to update most of my apps.
