12
votes
Mobile use
I got the new iPhone and my home screen shortcut to Tildes was removed. Found myself back on Reddit and just had an experience that reminded me how much distaste I have for their culture.
Made me wonder if we’ll ever have a native mobile app for Tildes. It’s really the biggest reason I’m not here far more often.
I’m sure it’s been discussed and I know there are tons of competing priorities- only sharing my perspective :).
There is no app planned, but it's definitely a bug that the home screen shortcut was not saved to your Apple account.
https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals#the-site-is-the-main-mobile-interface-not-an-app
Just curious - why not just use your mobile browser?
Yeah the mobile site works great. I don't think an app is needed. I think there's a mindset where every website needs to have an app which is unnecessary most of the time and is just for pushing ads.
The only thing that I have wanted from a mobile app that I haven't had on my mobile browser is notifications for comment replies and PMs. Is there a way to enable this on Firefox for Android?
EDIT: Nevermind, I hadn't read Bauke's comment yet.
That might be something that could be built into the site as a web push notification. It's not currently available in the desktop version of Firefox either.
Not push notifications, no, but websites can send you notifications even while you don't have a single tab of theirs loaded.
The one thing I'd like is for "minimal" mode or whatever to be enabled so that it launches as it's own app instead of being tied to the browser. I've heard some people say that this was how it worked originally but it was disabled due to a bug, hopefully that can get resolved.
It wasn't so much a bug as just different tastes. Some people liked the "minimal" mode with no browser UI, but other people hated that because it also got rid of useful browser UI like the refresh button and the back button. I want to try and let people choose which one they want, but I'm not exactly sure how to do that yet. It might require making people go to a specific page before doing "add to home screen" depending on which interface mode they want.
I think this would be okay. Besides, you can always have the current behavior as the default and provide alternative for those who care about it enough.
Is that a thing on iOS? I know it’s possible on Android.
I believe so, I just don't know the actual web-dev word for it.
Some folks I know live in the mobile browser, I’ve never connected with that UX :). A few reasons:
I'm one of those. For Tildes specifically, I don't really find a loss of screen estate. I also really dislike notifications, though I can definitely see others wanting it. Agree with the multitasking thing.
Thanks for responding.
This comes up ever so often, and the answer is still the same there won't be an 'official' Tildes mobile app because the site is intended to work as well on a mobile browser as on desktop. That doesn't mean there will never be apps for Tildes, people can make them if they want, just that the design of the site is intended to be such that making an app adds little to nothing.
If you use apple products, you should expect web apps to frequently break on them. They are all about their closed ecosystem and the open web has no place in there.
Tildes seems to work well on mobile Firefox with the Zoom Add-on to increase font size. I'm sure we will see some nice apps once a public API rolls out.