I've been evaluating Discourse for a while now to use on a a parenting and a gardening community I help manage.
Users on the parenting forum are youngish (20-40) and the gardening community are older (60-80), but what they do have in common is a high percentage of users on mobile devices (primarily iphone and ipad). On the parenting forum, just over 80% of traffic is on mobile devices (imagine a mother, small baby in one hand, phone in the other).
I've used Discourse before, but not on mobile. When I started using it on mobile to test the feature set, I was surprised by how janky the experience of creating a new topic is, as well as some other quirks.
On my iPhone 6, running iOS 10 and using Safari:
- when I create a new topic the modal jumps around as I switch between fields
- The text formatting icons are tiny (although perhaps this could be dealt with through custom css?)
- The location of the upload image button sits underneath my keypad - I have to know it's there to know I have to scroll down to upload an image
I've made a screencast of my phone here we're I've attempted to show this behaviour: https://youtu.be/Ewux3UW8nLg
I was excited by the release of the iPhone app but because that just gives you a webview, it doesn't solve any of my issues.
Does anyone else see these issues or is it just me?
I love the featureset of Discourse, the community around it, and the desktop experience, but the mobile experience is probably going to mean we end up going with something else...