Hacker News Reader

Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, KitKat isn't on the list of versions we support. We target Ice Cream Sandwich and above. Also, are you using the stock Android browser or did you install Chrome?

The problem isn't with that device isn't Famo.us, and IIRC it's not the hardware either, it's the implementation of the APIs we rely on in the browser.

Many people replace their mobile phones every 1-3 years. Now that smartphones are becoming feature phones and all these phones have the most recent versions of Android, it's only a matter of time.

View on HN

> FWIW, KitKat isn't on the list of versions we support. We target Ice Cream Sandwich and above.

Since when is KitKat (4.4) not "above" Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0)?

> Also, are you using the stock Android browser or did you install Chrome?

Well, I said Chrome, but the problems (at least, the ones listed in my previous post) are identical in the stock browser.

> Many people replace their mobile phones every 1-3 years.

Well, yeah, I just replaced my long-in-the-tooth iPhone 4 with a still-top-of-the-line Galaxy Note 3 (though the GNote 4 will be out fairly soon.) That's the phone we're talking about here.

> Now that smartphones are becoming feature phones and all these phones have the most recent versions of Android, it's only a matter of time.

But KitKat is the most recent version of Android, and you just said you don't support it.

Oops .. total brain fart on my part. Did the alphabet wrong in my head. I always felt more comfortable using numbers for versioning. Letters always require a little bit of mental gymnastics since it's uncommon to think of them as having ordinality in every day life.

Yes, we support KitKat. We'll investigate the experience on your device.

This link might be useful to your team: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history

Looks like KitKat has been out for 6 months. Just a heads up, the best Android devices are running KitKat, like the S4 & S5. I can confirm, the Famo.us scrolling & animations have issues on the S4.

That being said, your framework is amazing on iOS, and feels like a native app. I'm sure your team will have no problem with KitKat, if time is dedicated to it.

Oh we're familiar with it and we spend time trying to get Android working well. It's been a more challenging platform because the performance of the underlying APIs on Chrome has been more erratic.

FWIW, I made this versioning mistake because I'm one of the two people in the company who is the least familiar with Android versioning because I work on backend systems and tooling that we'll be releasing later this year. 90% of my time is spent in the terminal.

Anyways, homepage clearly needs some a lot of love. In the meantime, do you mind trying the following instructions in this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7771330 , on your Android device to see how the demos perform?

Hey Andrew, thanks for the clarification. I only had time to check out Albumatic, Rise, and PHQ4, on the Samsung S4. Albumatic was a bit laggy, Rise & PHQ4 were pretty great. Will have more feedback after the Hackathon.

Post Hackathon: Great framework. Really interested to see where it goes.

Awesome. Thanks for the feedback. We're working hard on pushing things forward and will fix the initial problems we've had.

I'm running Jelly Bean on my Note 3. I tried Chrome, Firefox, and the stock Android browser. Scrolling is weird and choppy in each of them, and then it takes a very long time to slow down and stop.

Ordinary websites that don't do anything fancy but just let the browser handle the scrolling work beautifully in all three browsers, with smooth, natural feeling scrolling and easing.

Hmm... Just tried it in Chrome in Windows. I can't scroll at all! Tried a bunch of things but nothing would scroll. Dragging the scroll bar just turns text blue. Cursor keys and PgUp/PgDn don't do anything.

I even tried the middle TrackPoint button figuring that would fool it, but no, they disabled that too.

Brand spanking new MotoX with Android 4.4 and Chrome. Homepage runs like a dog and scrolling is so erratic it's unusable.

Sorry to have to break it to you but "K" comes after "I" in the alphabet..

You are correct. I had a total brain fart.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com