Rant: Mobile Versions of Sites · 12:23am Dec 2nd, 2016
Mobile versions of sites, and mobile apps to replace sites (facebook, reddit) piss me off.
For starters, 99% of mobile sites/apps solve the problem of "How do we adjust our site designed for 1920x1080 down to fit a tiny phone screen?" by just cutting out over half the useful features. Don't have room for a search bar? Delete it. Don't have room for formatting options? Delete them. Don't have a keyboard for useful shortcuts? Delete all the shortcuts.
This was particularly frustrating me today on a few sites while I waited for my car to get diagnosed (which turns out, was what I thought it was and took them 4 hours. Still, cheaper to have them clean the $300 nothing-part than buy a new one.)
1. Fim Fiction - The mobile is okay... as long as you don't have to search for anything. There's no search bar. There's no search shortcut. If you know the name of an author or story and you want to read it, even if it's in your "Read Later" list, you better be ready to do a shit-ton of scrolling to find it.
And technically there "is" a search option, but if you have to go through five touches/menu clicks to get to what I would say is the core feature of the entire internet, the ability to search for something, then I'm sure there's a 500-page book somewhere written by Apple on intuitive design you should read.
(And if you're curious, you just have to hit browse, load the menu, pick a random topic, wait for it to load, hit search, wait for another menu to load, clear the random topic you picked from the list of tags, type in your story name, and hit enter. Fuck. Why even bother, I could have hit back and googled "fim fic immortal game" and found the story faster by *not* using your mobile site.)
And yes, I can (and do) force the desktop site because of this and it works fine, but why even bother to offer users a mobile options if you're going to do it poorly?
2. Reddit app. For an app all about reading people's opinions, I sure hope you've memorized their formatting system. Want to make a post? Great, an empty box will pop up with ZERO formatting options, bold, italic, underline, links, quotes? Tough shit.
At least Fim Fiction did that correctly, if I want to comment I can at least format it so it's not an atrocious wall of shit. But on Reddit, where 90% of the content is atrocious walls of shit? (and the other 10% is the rest of the site outside of r/the_donald) I have no formatting options.
So if you have an opinion that's longer than 2 sentences to post on reddit, delete the app and use the desktop site.
3. Discord mobile app. If you want to send someone a private message, which seems to me to be the core feature of instant messaging programs, you're fucked. You can't click their name in chat (that just copies it). You can't paste their name in the "find a friend box (the auto-paste formatting adds special characters that interfere with the search). You click the user list and click their name, and your only options are voice volume and mute.
So where is the option to, I don't know, click someone's name and send them a fucking message? Again, I have to stop what I'm doing and go out of my fucking way to access a basic feature of the program because some asshole programmer doesn't know how to do his fucking job and buries the "send a private message" feature so deep in the code it was probably written in fortran.
4. Auto-correct. Christ I fucking hate auto-correct. I've tried apple (the worst), samsung (second worst) and various third-party apps that are supposed to learn as they go. The only thing my phone has learned is to capitalize Fuck.
I tried to type glomp today and for some reason the fucking phone corrects it to glomo, which is also not a real word. So apparently it's programmed to say "Oh you're making a word up? I want to too! This is fun!" And when I go delete the o and type a p the phone is like "hehe I want to play too!" and switches it back to an o.
So when I finally edit for a third time the phones like "Oh okay, well I guess he really DID want that to be a p." And the next time I type glomp? It's forgotten and corrects it to glomo.
So I hypothesize that between auto-correct, and the fact I seem to be the only human being that likes intuitive user-friendly interfaces, the internet will literally cause me to have a brain aneurysm and die the next time I have to use it on a cell phone.
Or maybe this is all part of Trump's evil plan to constantly force websites to have seperate mobile sites and to update their user interfaces on BOTH versions constantly so I can't keep up and kill myself.
don't forget twitter you can't group chat
You know if you got anyone's home page on FIMfiction the format is exactly like the desktop version. So searching isn't that bad...honestly I can't say anything about the other sites so...yup people really should work out those problems eventually. I'd like it sooner rather than later, but that's just hopeful thinking on my part.
I honestly just google stories I'm looking for on fimfiction, it's way faster. Only problem with that is that I don't have photographic memory, so I usually can't remember the name of a story I read 2 years ago or something. Really would be handy to be able to filter by tags then, it just takes so much fiddling on the mobile version.
Reddit Is Fun is a good Reddit app, I'd try that one. Emotes on r/mylittlepony don't show up though..
yeah the lack of a search bar has always bothered me on the mobile version of this site, and reddit's mobile site is crap.
The worst part of mobile sites to me it that so many of them have the desktop site option at the bottom of the page. This means that unless your phone have a built in "Request Desktop" button you have to just keep scrolling to get to the bottom. Also why do so many mobile sites end up crashing the browser wen scrolling? Meanwhile the desktop sites runs perfectly on the phone. Its just stupid.
The things I've learned using mobile versions of sites and an autocorrect feature:
1. If there's an option to not to use the mobile version of any site for any purpose, it should be immediately picked, no exceptions. All "desktop" versions work better on mobile than mobile ones. The fact that <censored> Google made no way to make 'request desktop version' the default option in mobile Chrome makes me
The guy in their development team that insists on keeping it that way despite the suggestion thread bursting from the rage of the users should be given to a very horny rabid elephant.
2. Autocorrect must be killed with fire every time it tries to turn on. Word suggestion box on top of the screen keyboard is as far as it should be allowed to exist.
3. Screen keyboard suck.
I use Chrome for day-to-day surfing, but when a site forces me to use the mobile version (I'm looking at you, Twitch) I use Puffin. Neat little app that loads all the website serverside, then streams the result almost like an interactive video.
As for autocorrect, I don't have any problems, but my mobile device is an iPad, so the keyboard isn't tiny unusable garbage.
*Mobile is atrocious piece of fucking shit
I can't click any menu items on my phone. The only way the site is usable is if I load directly to my profile (where mobile-mode doesn't apply for some reason) or request the desktop version on my browser.
Also on my old phone where the menus did work they were headache inducing because not all of them fit into the screen and trying to scroll of touch anything closed whichever sub-menu I had open.
And that popout panel on the right always gets in the way when I try to click something close to that side of the screen. The hot zone for it is just too big and why the hell does it have to extend the full height of the screen!?
I've installed the google keyboard with their autocorrect that seems to work much better.
I've also disabled the 'insert highlighted word when I press space' and 'insert fullstops when I press enter' to keep it from making changes to what I type, since I sometimes write rough drafts on my phone.
Something else you missed on FIM mobile- no profile images unless you go to the person's profile page (and as a result load the desktop version)
That stupid little bar at the top right needs an option to be disabled, I never use the thing.
Group replies to several people at once- I don't think that can be done in comments either, so I rely on good old @namehere.
Sincerely, a person who uses the mobile site 100% of the time I'm on FIMfic, woe is me.
I just go to the search page by clicking "Browse" twice. Once the menu is open and you click browse, it takes you to the search page with no tags applied.