Git Our App: We Love Open Source, but Not Enough to Share Code for Our Own Mobile App
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:
GitHub's mobile app for developers and other team members working on projects in GitHub repositories is now generally available for users of iOS and Android.
The app was announced in November 2019 by Ryan Nystrom, director of engineering, at the Universe event and has been in beta since then, initially for iOS only, but now GA for both platforms.
Coding on a mobile device is largely not a great experience, though web-based IDEs have their place. The GitHub app however is aimed at all the other things developers do, such as raising or commenting on issues, approving pull requests (requests to merge new code), and responding to notifications such as @mentions .
Developers can drill down into pull requests and see the code that has been added or deleted. The app includes syntax highlighting for popular programming languages.
GitHub wrote the app separately for iOS and Android, using Swift for iOS and Kotlin on Google's platform. A native look and feel for each platform was favoured, rather than trying to do a cross-platform user interface or mimicking the GitHub website. In an interview, Nystrom and GitHub designer Brian Lovin explained how they mocked up a design for one platform and had the team on the other platform replicate it with appropriate adjustments. The downside of the approach is that the app works differently from visiting the GitHub website with a mobile browser, meaning more to learn.
[...] A common complaint is that the app only works with GitHub, and not with custom installations of GitHub Enterprise Server.
[...] It is a good start then, but not yet everything users hoped for. There is one oddity though. At the Universe event, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman stood on stage with a backdrop declaring, "Open source has won." Yet this mobile app is not open source, though Nystrom said on Twitter: "Not right now," implying the possibility of change.
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