Android annoyances that prevent me from using it

Hello Takuya,

first I want to thank you for everything you do and sorry if one of the following issues is mentioned elsewhere that I haven’t found in the first place.

I want to describe some issues that make the Android app really hard to use when you want to also edit things there.

Bug report for Android

  • text selection does not work

    • whenever I try to select text (so that the popup for copy, past and so on appears) it’s not working and the selection disappears instantly. I try to long press, double press or tripple press some text - nothing works.
  • open links does not work

    • it’s ok if I can’t touch on a link and it does not open (UX issue propably). But it would be nice if I would be able to select and copy it so I can open it in a browser (depends on the first issue)
  • revisions don’t show up

    • because I managed to select a text and try to long press on it to get a copy/paste-dialouge I accedantely moved the text. Now the Link is messed up and I can’t undo this. Also revisions don’t show up so I could go back to a previous revision
  • no undo / redo

    • there is no undo / redo
  • no search for text within a note

    • I often want to search within a note, not globally
  • really slow on long notes

    • I have a really long note that I want to open but the device is not responding for a very long time. When I touch somehwere in the note it again gets inresponsive again for at least a few seconds - depending on the note even more than 10 seconds

With this all in summary I sadly can’t edit notes effectively and can use the Android app just for viewing purposes.

Info

  • Platform: Android, newest stable

Hi Marco,

Thank you for the report.

text selection does not work & really slow on long notes

Yeah, I found that building a Markdown editor with React Native is so hard.
It is based on CodeMirror with my patches, but it doesn’t work so well on mobile devices unfortunately, especially on Android. Gboard messes up cursor move, selections, and text input, and I’ve been tackling many times as you can see in other existing topics.
The critical reason is that Gboard doesn’t provide ways to handle it in webview.
As you said, the performance is really bad. That’s due to the patch to avoid the issues above.
The new version of CodeMirror targets mobile platforms and the problem is expected to be solved, but I’m not sure if they will solve this issue.

The best way to solve it is obviously to build a native editor from scratch for Android.
But I have to also take care of iOS platform.
It’s gonna take years to implement and be really hard.
Searching for an alternative solution.

open links does not work

It’d be nice to show a button to open a link when cursor is at it.

revisions don’t show up

It is not editing history but revisions, which means that you don’t get new revision unless you save it.

no undo / redo

You can do it from toolbar.

no search for text within a note

text selection does not work & really slow on long notes

I also thought about a keyboard issue but switched between Swype and Gboard. The issues sadly remain.

open links does not work

Or if the selection works it also wouldn’t be that of a problem to copy it so you dron’t have to code your own custom overlay / popup for link selection.

open links does not work

The note was an older note where there should be revisions. It’s a self-hosted couchdb environment if this makes a difference. But the revisions haven’t shown up lateley on Android.

Yes, the thing is so complicated.

That’s because revisions are only stored locally:

You don’t get the old revisions that are created on other devices.
This is by design of the database.