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Comment by nsm | Hacker News Reader

I am curious to understand what bearing "lots and lots of regular people solely use their cellphone to conduct consumer transactions" has on GitHub, whose audience is significantly different than median and cannot otherwise function without a laptop/desktop.

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I don't know but I really wish it was possible to have the web desktop in mobile, GitHub has a terrible app that can't do anything and even worse mobile view. In the past it was possible to tell it to run the desktop version of the website with the browser setting but this isn't possible anymore. I have a very big phone, it's screen has a ton of pixels, just give me a grown up UI exactly like the desktop instead of the dumbed down, way too zoomed in whatever thing you are offering on mobile.

It's very possible. Firefox for Android has a "Desktop site" switch in each tab's menu that works fine, including for GitHub.

Chrome does too

Safari as well

It does not work fine on Github.

I frequently use GitHub on my phone, making edits to my projects using their web edit button. And I have a very decent laptop.

I wish Codespaces worked better on mobile! It would be great to see them invest more work in that.

Anecdotally I've heard that there are people out there who have successfully learned to program entirely on mobile devices.

If it works for you then great, I guess. But that sounds like the equivalent of using nail clippers to mow the lawn. You're forgoing a good tool for an absolutely terrible tool.

What exactly is your use case for doing edits on your phone? Are you making these edits while out and about without your laptop (in line?) or do you actually avoid getting your laptop out even when it's close by?

Usually tiny things like typo fixes on web pages or in my documentation.

Occasionally I'll ship feature changes to my JavaScript apps, usually copy and pasted over from Claude.

I just shipped this change from my phone: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/commit/a0f731ecb...

I've been blown away by amazon/gcp/azure whose uis progressively waste more and more space. I actually measured it, and on a normal (11"?) laptop screen the list of vms occupied something like 15% of the screen space, the rest being sticky pannels, banners, sidebars, toolbars, etc. Combined with "resizable" panes that are restricted to max 30% of the parent area size I can see between 1 and 2 lines of results. Not desktop/laptop, they don't even work on laptop.

I reported it in those offline "please rate the new ui" feedback popups, but it's clear that they have no idea who use their UIs.

Even using the AWS Console on a 13in screen is painful

I long for the late 2000s/early 2010s style of web administration UIs which tried to sorta-kinda look like a desktop app, they'd have things in like, tables trying to be like LVS_REPORT where you'd rarely have to scroll and rows were 14 pixels high etc.

Nowadays stuff like this is a sea of divs with an ocean of margins and padding. Or just straight up card-based layouts.

This presentation was more about industry trends than GitHub specifically. My point here is that as time in apps becomes a greater portion of the average user's time on the internet, the more poorly-built web experiences will stick out.

If the “mobile” app had feature parity, maybe we would not be so different from the median? Github has cloud development tools; why can’t I use them with the keyboard and mouse connected to my phone?

I imagine because practically 0% of the population have mice and keyboards attached to their phone. You can go to vscode.dev and similar on a phone web browser if you really wish.

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