Android annoyances that prevent me from using it

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1

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 havenā€™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) itā€™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

    • itā€™s ok if I canā€™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 donā€™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 canā€™t undo this. Also revisions donā€™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 canā€™t edit notes effectively and can use the Android app just for viewing purposes.

Info

  • Platform: Android, newest stable
2

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 doesnā€™t work so well on mobile devices unfortunately, especially on Android. Gboard messes up cursor move, selections, and text input, and Iā€™ve been tackling many times as you can see in other existing topics.
The critical reason is that Gboard doesnā€™t provide ways to handle it in webview.
As you said, the performance is really bad. Thatā€™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 Iā€™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.
Itā€™s gonna take years to implement and be really hard.
Searching for an alternative solution.

open links does not work

Itā€™d be nice to show a button to open a link when cursor is at it.

revisions donā€™t show up

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

no undo / redo

You can do it from toolbar.

no search for text within a note

3

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 wouldnā€™t be that of a problem to copy it so you dronā€™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. Itā€™s a self-hosted couchdb environment if this makes a difference. But the revisions havenā€™t shown up lateley on Android.

4

Yes, the thing is so complicated.

Thatā€™s because revisions are only stored locally:

You donā€™t get the old revisions that are created on other devices.
This is by design of the database.