Mobile: PWA or regular web site?

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I am not a heavy mobile user, in the sense that most of the time I do have a “real” computer just in front of me, and prefer to use that computer rather than my phone. But there are a few operations that to me just make sense on the mobile, and currently don’t work with the PWA, for instance, roughly in order of importance to me:

  • Getting a list of all the items with a given tag across all lists. Use case: I put tags on items that I want to do when I’m at a certain place of with certain people I see every day (wife, coworker), which in GTD parlance you’d call “contextes”. This way, when I’m with a certain person or in a certain place, I can quickly check what I had to discuss with that person or do in that place, and also find, navigating from that item, notes that I might have “around” that item. With the PWA, I can search for tags in a given list, but not across lists.
  • The PWA doesn’t sync the open/closed status of tasks with the regular web site, and I tend to use that opened/closed state to keep track of what’s current. If not synced, and everything is closed, I feel like I needlessly have to open lots of branches to find what I need, and conversely, if everything is opened, the list will unwieldy.
  • Deep links won’t open the PWA. I’ve talking about the links like https://checkvist.com/checklists/736560/tasks/38685085 that you get with lc or that you get in calendar events when using the calendar integration. When those links are in notes, the PWA could “do the right thing” instead of opening the browser, but I don’t think a PWA can handle the latter, at least on iOS (a full app can).

So I find myself using the regular web site on mobile, specifically on Safari for iOS, as it is pretty rare for me to be in a pace that has neither WiFi nor cell phone reception. But while the regular web site works surpassingly well on mobile, to me even better the PWA, it to has its problems:

  • I can’t delete an item (adding Delete to the contextual menu would be good enough).
  • I find it hard to mark items as done: it seems that the left to right swipe needs to be done “just right”, and I often need a few tries before it works for me. (Here too, I think I would just prefer to have a Mark as done entry in the contextual menu.)

So, I’m wondering:

  1. At high level, what is your take on the future of Checkvist on mobile?
  2. Maybe more on the short term, are some of the above issues fixable, or should I be using Checkvist differently?

‑Alex

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Hello, Alessandro,

Thanks a lot for the detailed and thoughtful post. It took us some time to ponder and merge ideas between us two before replying :slightly_smiling_face:

Ideally, of course, we would like to have one PWA application, that would work on any device, offline and online, with a full feature set. Unfortunately, adding offline capabilities to the desktop app would require quite a lot of efforts. So, looks like we have to sit on two horses and try to improve both of them in the areas where they need it most.

The mobile PWA app will be eventually converted into the hybrid iOS/Android apps and will be placed into the appropriate stores. At the same time, the desktop app will be improved to make it more usable on tablets/iPads.

Talking about features/problems you mentioned:

  • On PWA, we plan to add the Tags page or add the cross-list search function (not sure which comes first, but either should be useful in your case).

  • We’ll think about synchronization of the collapse/expand and the focused state of the list with the main app (you are right, that is a basic usability feature)

  • Deep links should open in the PWA. That’s a bug and we are going to explore and fix it with the upcoming releases.

Besides, we are going to improve the usability of tagging and due dates adding. Plus, add some gesture-based functions, like adding an item with a pinch, and alike.

For the desktop app, adding ‘Delete’ and ‘Mark as done’ to the Actions menu is a minimum, will try to add it this year. Unconvenient swipe on the desktop is also a thing to be improved.

There are of course much more features and fixes we want to implement in both Checkvist versions, and we are trying hard to prioritise and concentrate on the most important ones.

Thanks a lot again for asking questions - thus we know what matters to our customers :slight_smile:

Kind regards,
KIR

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