GitHub for mobile is now available
github.blog
github.blog
For example, I do quite a few code reviews on my Pixel 2, but what drives me crazy is that the lines in the diffs wrap! On top of that, the code font it uses is pretty large, so wrapping happens often and makes reviewing much harder.
The support for per-commit code review (which is only so-so in the desktop web experience) is even harder to use on mobile.
The main activity feed from / is nowhere to be seen, even though this is something I use daily on my laptops (long-standing pet peeve, since this is also non-existent in the mobile web view).
If you follow a link to particular issue comment (for example, from the bottom of a notification email), the Android app will just land you at the top of the issue.
So, having the app is an improvement over the mobile web experience (particularly since the PR review approval button was impossible to hit in the mobile web view without zooming), but IMO there's still a lot to be done here, and I hope they keep executing on it.
> The main activity feed from / is nowhere to be seen, even though this is something I use daily on my laptops
Can you tell me more about what you use this feed for? You're talking about the one on the github.com home page?
Again thanks for the feedback, we have a lot of work to do still! Forwarding this comment to the team.
Additionally, perhaps the code review process on mobile could be somewhat different from the desktop experience. Instead of trying to display the full diff all at once for a file, perhaps you aggregate the diff regions, and then display those one-at-a-time. Sort of like a tinder for code reviews. Swipe left on a diff region for deeper review, swipe right for approval. Lots of cool stuff you can do if you fully-leverage the mobile device environment and related user knowledge.
BTW, I love the direction all of this is headed in. Keep up the great work.
> Can you tell me more about what you use this feed for? You're talking about the one on the github.com home page?
Yes, that's the one I'm talking about. I use it to see who's starring repos I'm involved in, who's following me, and what the developers I follow are starring (the feed also has stuff about what people are pushing to repos I watch, but that is not interesting to me because I usually keep track of it by following PRs or issues). Just keeping track of what's going on in the world.
Also, now that I have your attention, please please read https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2020/01/07/problems-with-pull-... and make life better for those experienced engineers who do per-commit reviews.
Finally, I found the feedback handling from the betas somewhat discouraging. At least when I tried it, it just emailed off and there was no follow-up at all. If that process was a bit more conducive, I might have given you this feedback sooner.
I don't want to have an account (because they want email), so it looks like this is the end of github for me.
EDIT: in android firefox, I found the "Request Desktop Site" works (on a code page) e.g. https://github.com/termux/termux-app There is also a desktop link in the footer, but it doesn't work.
WARNING: If I try the desktop link and then "Request Desktop Site", I get to https://github.com/site/mobile_preference (a 404). Starting fresh and just doing "Request Desktop Site" works.
Ironically, can't dig up the link on mobile since I've not yet clicked that button.
"Mobile settings" [ ] Opt out of mobile pages This will cause all your sessions and devices to only experience the desktop site for all pages. Pages designed to be responsive will still scale down properly.
Same thing here. I’m mostly using CodeHub on iOS, but if GH adds the feed, I’m probably switching over to their app.
I actually sent them a support ticket about this, and this was their reply:
"I understand how the previous workflow would be useful, and we apologize for the inconvenience it has caused.
However, the good news is that the mobile team is working on releasing iOS and Android GitHub mobile applications early next year, which should resolve some of the limitations of the current mobile site."
Like really, just give me the desktop view back ffs.
(This is with YouTube set to request desktop site always in settings).
Totally agree with you here. Lots of other sites link to GitHub and being pulled out of the browser and into a native app is just not a good user experience. I've uninstalled Facebook and Twitter the same reason, and I enjoy using the social sites a lot more now.
I had been trying to tell myself that people still "sit down at a desktop to do work" to make myself feel better about our inaction over this it but that github is spending on mobile form factor makes me feel like I'm lying to myself about that.
What are people's general takes on this? I sway towards "in twenty years it will start to be a massive deal" but I struggle to find a convincing platform to soapbox on this to the organisation at large.
So you're better off generally to make the app a web app. If that doesn't work yet, are you sure about that? With web assembly and some new browser apis it's really very few apps left that actually need the native experience.
Sure if you build apps for cars, planes or something like that I understand that you want the native experience. But there is also tons of "native with an asterisk" tools like Xamarin and React Native for example.
Sure the app may be a bit larger but do users really care? With those kind of technologies you can build native for all platforms easily.
The choice really is up to the developers and there is lots of choices nowadays, thankfully.
I vaguely bought into the idea for a while and now github are like:
> Review PRs and look at code on a mobile form factor
and now I'm like:
> oh, so that use-case is a thing?
I'm terrified some CTO in twenty years time of an org we want to sell it to will instantly shitcan our offering because it doesn't support mobile use-cases. Because mobile is their culture and the reason we don't value it today is _only_ because mobile isn't the culture we grew up with.
Being a dinosaur and seeing a big fiery thing in the sky. Thinking maybe it'd be better to get a bit of a head start on that mammal business. But its hard to make that business case, isn't it? Thankfully this news makes it easier I guess.
I am most intrigued.
They're kind of strange, to be honest.
Perhaps the typical university path makes it less common? I'd imagine the autodidact path might be more likely for a new breed should the new breed even exist.
I would highly recommend downloading it if you sometimes take a look at GitHub repos when on your phone, which I think is most programmers.
Unfortunately I didn't use it for about fourteen days or something so my beta access was taken away :(
I use this all the time for the repos I work with to review recent work by my colleagues.
* Repository names aren't centered to the screen; they're centered to the space left between the bar button items. This might be intentional but is somewhat strange and out-of-place on iOS.
* Repositories with "strange" licenses show up with "None" rather than "tap here to see the actual license".
* Submodules used to show up as "Something went wrong". Now they show up as "Unable to view file".
* Tabs don't actually line up to a character boundary.
Since you're here, a couple more that I haven't bothered to get around to submitting:
* There's a lot of places that could use search fields. The repositories list, the organizations list, notifications, individual repositories (i.e. code search/file search)…
* A view to see a list of commits would be nice.
* There's a text-field looking thing on my profile for a status that I cannot actually figure out how to put text into.
* It'd be nice if links had the option of opening in SFSafariViewController.
* Code viewing is a bit uncomfortable, especially on smaller screens. The font size is a tad large, line spacing is pretty big, and not being able to disable wrapping on demand is somewhat inconvenient.
* It'd be nice to be able to review multiple lines at once.
I have a bunch more but I can't really recall them at the moment, so I'll keep submitting feedback in-app and hoping that you can get around to taking a look at it. Thanks!
GitHub, you could have shown the world what a truly responsive and progressive website GitHub is.
This is going far off topic, but I am currently consulting with a client that requested using Visual Studio Community Edition [2019] for the project. I was a month into development, when all of a sudden one morning, it was no longer possible to start Visual Studio. Why? Because I had not connected it to my Microsoft account, of course... I wonder how people put up with this..
The same way hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) use GitHub Desktop connected to their GitHub accounts?
I'm not even going to bother checking out this official app because Octodroid is perfect.
Being the go-to place for open source code is what leads a lot of people/companies to GitHub's paid offerings.
Nowadays I have slack on my phone and click links to open PRs occasionally.
I think I don't understand the question; how is github's app different than e.g. airbnb's?
People use Airbnb to rent apartments and people use GitHub to develop and share source code for software.
The grandparent asked a question, my point is that you could replace "github" with any other company that keeps both a web app and a mobile app:
> > Could someone explain to me why would someone use GitHub on their phones rather than on a desktop computer?
Tried the app for this and it seems great!
Strongly recommended. And the author responds to emails all the time.
-edit
It does use 2fa, I retried signing out of the browser and app, and then it prompted. It was using the browser token.
If so, note to self; use first party app's token.
My use case is that I batch a few small code reviews for the end of the day, and check on the status of some larger reviews that doing early reviews or working through edits.
I've previously been using the website on a mobile web browser, but it's not mobile optimized so touch points are fiddly, views need to be adjusted, long lines are hard to read, and I need to be wary about losing connection when adding a comment. Complex reviews sometimes take review of code in other files, jumping back and forth, so the mobile experience is lacking.
First impression is that the contrast for the red/green highlights seems a little low. I may just not be used to the color scheme though.
EDIT: I was able to open the app store link on my phone, and it worked then. Apple's indexes not updated I guess?
I just wish I got a push notification...for when I'm assigned to review a PR. Really annoying.
1. click the install button in Google Play the app
2. open chrome and continue browsing HN
3. come across an HN post that's hosted on GitHub, and click on it
4. When prompted, tell Android that I always want to open GitHub links in the GitHub app
5. When the app opens, tap the sign in button
Expected: a form to enter my username
Actual: app disappears and I'm back at the launcher
Tried this to fix it:
- force quit the app
- clear storage and cache
Didn't work.
What I guess is happening: GitHub app is trying to redirect me to the system browser to log in, but Android intercepts the link as it's on the GitHub.com domain, so should be opened by the GitHub app. But around that time, the GitHub app decides it wants to background itself and wait to be reopened by an intent, once the browser completes the auth process.
Just a guess.
> At Universe [...]
What is universe?
Now... any plans to open source these repos?!
I'd much rather have Github provide an app that shows me trends and analytics that only they have access to. There are (or were) a few sites and apps that provided a way to see most starred repos by various criteria like all-time vs last week, language, company, search term, etc., but they're hit or miss, and often die when Github changes their API.
Not only is it very helpful for my career, but I also personally enjoy seeing what is becoming very popular out there, and what I might be able to use on future projects.
I think Github is missing out on some money if they don't end up monetizing their knowledge of what projects are most popular (beyond just stars and forks) - any project lead or architect who is still using sales teams, marketing, etc. to decide on what tools and frameworks to use is going to be left in the dust by the ones who keep up to date on what's trending at Github, especially for higher level projects related to Kubernetes, clustering, DB scaling, etc.
I guess working copy is still the best git client for ios.
Then on mobile, where there's very little git client competition, pretty much just Working Copy, they don't make a git client, and instead emphasize the social features...
GitHub isn’t competing against Working Copy, or SourceTree. It’s competing against GitLab etc. So on desktop, they aimed to make an oversimplified beginner’s git client, to encourage beginners to use GitHub over alternatives. On mobile I suspect it was just too hard to build what people needed as a web app. Some people want push, which iOS web apps can’t do. May as well have it do a bunch of other things people like to do from their phone, and beat web with native controls.
But the point about the desktop client I don't really follow, and that's my issue with GitHub's app product strategy: I think both apps should be about the social features.
I don't understand why a beginner's git client is important (is that really what GitHub Desktop is supposed to be?). And I'm not sure what this means: "it would be a waste of your employees to constantly replicate work to the desktop client"?
I want a social GitHub Desktop client because I want the better integration with my desktop, e.g., I want notifications for PR reviews and comments on issues, and I want to be able to jump immediately to the actual source code file being commented on in my local copy of the source. It seems like these are similar benefits to why Slack has a desktop app for example. And these are the types of integrations that would further differentiate GitHub from other git hosts.
If you address all those things, congrats, you've still barely reached par, and what do you have to show for it? Maybe a cool new look? This is why it's a waste, and an ongoing cost as GitHub.com evolves.
This is true of every web app that also has a desktop app, e.g., Slack, Trello, Notion, and Figma. So yes, that trade off always exists. I'd just prefer GitHub make the decision differently, like those apps I listed do, and choose to have a desktop app.
> You want notifications, it could do them!
Notifications are worse in the browser. E.g., they cannot provide a badge on the app icon, and I cannot easily switch to the app that's the source of the notification like I can with a desktop app. I want the same communication workflow that I use with email and Slack, i.e., I get a notification that someone has commented on my code, and a badge icon as a reminder to address it. Then I can click the app icon when I'm ready to address it (and open the relevant source files directly in my editor if I need to).
> You want to jump to an editor, no reason why the web couldn't do that (although you might have to switch branches!).
Can you walk me through how a web app would implement that feature? E.g., the browsers sandboxing model prohibits access to the file system? And how would a website even know where the repo was checked out?
> Slack is different because when you're chatting, you don't really need tabs, but on GH I will usually have 10-15 open from a few different repos that stay mixed in with other pages for context. You're throwing away all the good things about browsers if you make it all native.
Again, all of that is true of every app that has a desktop app and a web app. Also many desktop apps also support tabs? E.g., VS Code. In fact, tabs are built-in at the window manager level on macOS. And you wouldn't have to choose between the desktop app and the web, just like with those other apps you could use the solution that best fits the situation.
> And then you remember that every social feature comes at the cost of executing a git client really well. I'm personally very happy with GitUp.app not being clogged up with GitHub API calls to fetch comments, and showing alerts that when clicked will pull me away from the commit diff I was viewing. It works exactly as Git does offline. If you address all those things, congrats, you've still barely reached par, and what do you have to show for it? Maybe a cool new look? This is why it's a waste, and an ongoing cost as GitHub.com evolves.
I'm not really following this paragraph, e.g., "showing alerts that when clicked", what's the referring to? But let me give a counter perspective: The GitHub client I'm envisioning would not be a git client, it would be GitHub client. E.g., you would not be able to stage commits in it. In my experience, the number of developers that use a GUI git client is vanishingly small (personally I think GUI git clients are great, but anecdotally they're very rare among my colleagues). Therefore, I think making a git client is a silly market for a company of GitHub's size to be involved in. Whereas as their social features, and the level of integration they could do between a checked out repo and comments/issues, those would be true differentiating features that would keep developers from switching to other hosts like GitLab.
Same way you open a URL in the App Store? Not hard to let VSCode manage repo URL => workspace path mappings.
> Also many desktop apps also support tabs
Read again: "10-15 open from a few different repos that stay mixed in with other pages for context". Can't do that. You need a pretty huge value proposition for me to be willing to drop contextual tabbing to switch to your native app.
> I'm not really following this paragraph, e.g. "showing alerts that when clicked"
That's on you man, you brought up notifications. You also clearly understood when you replied on-point, no need for dramatically hand-waving an entire paragraph as incomprehensible.
> In my experience, the number of developers that use a GUI git client is vanishingly small
This tells me that GitHub.com is doing the everything-except-staging-commits job just fine for most people. AFAIK you add little value extending GH's analysis to live checkouts, and to gain what little there is, you'd have to bring some of that analysis online, compiled into the app, instead of cloud job queues. Pretty obvious why they wouldn't want to do that!
Is there not a way to configure the deep links?
Is Microsoft's new app for GitHub free software, or even open-source software? If not, this is laughably ironic.
I try not to do too much on my phone regarding Github, I feel like anything with lots of what should be preformatted text on a phone is just horrible in general.
However, this may be terrible news for other third-party apps since Apple, Microsoft and Github can work together to forcibly shut down any unauthorised clients with legal action due to this release.
GitHub can easily file a complaint and Apple will happily remove any infringing app off of the App Store.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#int...
GitHub provides an API to access all of these things.
If Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Discord can draw the line on third-party clones, with the release of the official GitHub apps, they can also do this too.