eblu

send me veni/whirli/scolipedes • 22

links below are in order of most to least preferred


mastodon (preferred!)
wetdry.world/@eblu

Jordan-DwS
@Jordan-DwS

It's weird to me that Cohost doesn't seem to have a dedicated Android app yet when the mobile browser version already functions in a very app-like manner. You could make a home screen icon for the Cohost homepage and get almost the exact same function as a dedicated app might provide. I suppose that also means that the development of a proper app can be safely deprioritised, but its complete nonexistence is strange all the same.


gabu
@gabu

yeah and while android has that option to "add to home screen" a webpage to "turn it into an app", i immediately found this has a big annoying problem with how the back button works compared to what you'd expect from an app

(obviously aside from no integration with system notifications; whether you'd want this is another matter of course)

my bigger annoyance is if you click on an image and it makes the image fullscreen in a lightbox, in any other app if you press the back button it'd go back to the timeline and hide the lightbox again. but because it's a browser, pressing back just goes back a page, which in this case means its closes the entire browser and goes back to your home screen (of if you were on page 2 of the timeline you go back to page 1)

i assume its because opening a lightbox or any other popover or modal does not add an entry on top of the browser history, which you wouldn't really want for regular browser use, but for an app the expected user experience is that every "change in view" goes on the stack, and the back button goes backwards through every change in view

small things like this really drive home that, making a responsive website's goal is to make a website work well on mobile form factor devices, but it does not automatically result in an app


lapisnev
@lapisnev

I see a new chost on my timeline every day where someone is baffled by nearly every major, fundamental, conscious decision that was made while designing Cohost, and it drives me insane because those are the exact same reasons I love being here.


lapisnev
@lapisnev
This post has content warnings for: rant.

obspogon
@obspogon

people will make third party apps once the public API drops anyway.


eblu
@eblu

I'm fine with the PWA jank but my main concern is how unstable Firefox seems to be with them on Android. I'm not sure whether it's because of Samsung's aggressive background task killing on their flavor of Android or just the browser not receiving as much attention as it should but I'm frequently faced with opening the app just to see nothing but a black screen (even if I just so much as flip over to another app to respond to a message for a few seconds), which I have to manually close and reopen again just to be met with the homepage again because yeah?????? This is functional??????????

As for the icon-not-working bug; I believe that I figured out why it's happening but can't really intervene on that front. I'm hoping that it gets picked up in the ticket-clearing fervor that the staff is working on because it looks like a quick fix from the user side (but as we all know, no fix is ever quick).


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Jordan-DwS's post:

That makes a lot of sense! I'm glad the devs are prioritising smartly. That said, having to use a browser as an app stand-in does lead to a good handful of annoyances, like having to wait for a full page refresh and not being able to navigate backwards easily. Still, it's much better than nothing!

in reply to @lapisnev's post:

Really my only issues with the mobile version is that (on iOS at least) the headless web view lacks a refresh button. That + general slowness of the interface makes it feels a bit clunky to use. Otherwise, I agree that it's perfectly serviceable and I'm entirely for having no system notifications whatsoever

I want it to be native. There should be some battery life optimization possible, and you’d get a second chance at little details like what size images to load. The PWA works fine enough, sure, but having another refinement pass might lead to some nice things. Whenever staff releases that API they’ve been working on I’m gonna take a crack at it.

oh don't misunderstand me, i completely agree with you about all those points! (unless i'm misunderstanding and you were talking in general and not necessarily about me)

all i was saying was like, making a PWA does not result in a native app: it results in a PWA. it could look and feel indistinguishable, but that doesn't happen "for free", and even then there might always be some differences as a result of it being a browser window

also you could turn my complaint around and say there could be improvements made on the OS side in terms of integration of PWAs. either way, definitely not blaming staff for not doing a good enough job or anything, i love it here :)

your point about reporting a bug is very good and i'm going to check if the back button behavior quirk has been reported yet and otherwise make a topic about it!