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Ryan Norton
Ryan Norton

Posted on

GitHub on the go?

Do you use a mobile app for Github? I'm trying to implement some code-reading time, and having access from my phone sounds like a good plan.
Thoughts?
-Ryan

Top comments (15)

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defman profile image
Sergey Kislyakov

I use GitPoint on my phone. I like to stay up-to-date with the projects I'm watching (issues/PRs/etc).

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Ben Halpern

Are you satisfied with it in general?

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defman profile image
Sergey Kislyakov

It's a bit unresponsive/slow on the first load but in general I like it. I haven't seen a better client anyway.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I'm surprised GitHub hasn't come out with an app. It's not exactly resource-limited company, and if third parties can pull something half-decent with the public API, GitHub themselves should be able to something too.

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defman profile image
Sergey Kislyakov

Well, to be fair If I was Github, I wouldn't spend my resources on the mobile app. You can view issues and comment on them in your browser. Other tasks such as PR review or file editing are way too complicated to do them using a phone imo. It's good to see 3rd-party clients for Github and if they (Github) were interested in creating a mobile app (so spending resources on the app would worth it), they would create it already.

If you have an idea of a mobile Github workflow, I'd want to hear about it. I rarely comment on issues from my phone, mostly just view them. Reviewing commits is PITA because the display is not that big (5' vs 22'). So I could use a web browser but native apps rulez!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Yeah, I'm backseat driving and I'm sure they know what they're doing. I would think a good mobile workflow would be one that emphasizes the discussion portion with issues, but also has a custom interface for PR review. I'm not convinced a lot of that can't be done on the phone, it would just take some innovation, and it would help if they got something out and then iterated. Eventually I bet it could work with some intuitive gestures, etc.

It would be interesting to see if, say, GitLab wanted to challenge GitHub in this arena and get a headstart. Of course, it's harder for the smaller company to go multi-platform. It's certainly why our tiny team hasn't worked on a native app even though a lot of our traffic is mobile.

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Christian Baer

GitHub did have a mobile app. They decided to discontinue the development in favour for a mobile website.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Despite my blowhardedness, this is probably the right choice. The mobile web is getting better and better. Has GitHub ever talked publicly about their reasoning for these choices?

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Houssein Djirdeh

As much as I really push for not needing a native solution for apps that can work well on the mobile browser, I've always felt the need to rely on a third party native GitHub client. Couldn't find any that were completely free and had everything that I needed, so I built GitPoint :)

This article was really the only mention I've heard about their mobile website but haven't heard anything about their reasoning either. Definitely curious as well.

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David Israwi

I've also used GitPoint.

The app is not that old, it's in continuous open-source development. Here's the repo if you guys want to check it out github.com/gitpoint/git-point

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housseindjirdeh profile image
Houssein Djirdeh

Author of GitPoint here <3. Every available mobile client that I tried to use seemed too simple, required payment or really didn't have the best UI. That plus the fact I was itching to build something with React Native gave me enough reason to build the app :)

The project is still far from perfect but we have an active community and are looking forward to smoothing things out and adding a number of features in the next few releases. Please don't hesitate to let us know if we can improve in anyway if you give it a shot.

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Plugaru Tudor

I'm using FashHub on Android. Pretty good.

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Jose Angel Munoz

I use CodeHub for IOS and to me is most than perfect.

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Rob Waller

I wrote something on this topic a couple weeks back. Hope it helps... robdwaller.github.io/2017/08/01/th...

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Petar Šlat • Edited

On Android I'm using FastHub for GitHub. Everything else was not good.

I will take a look at GitPoint