In my search for answers, I’ve found that this has been an issue for years. I spent this weekend building a simple doc for the small business I work for to go digital only to discover that the mobile app is almost useless. I just need to know if there’s been any indication of when the app might get updated.
Related: The lack of usability on mobile browsers means I can’t in good conscience bring up the possibility of publishing a simple website when they’ll just end up thinking I provided them with a half-baked solution.
These two issues are preventing me from feeling comfortable showing my boss what I’ve built, because I know I could offer them a better user experience with Notion. These people are not tech savvy, but I know the simple solutions offered by both Coda or Notion will serve them much better than a whole business software solution targeting their business-type where they’ll spend way too much money to use 10% of the features after a nontrivial learning curve.
Please, someone tell me I don’t have crawl back to Notion. These years-old posts about these very issues has me concerned that I shouldn’t invest anymore time in Coda beyond personal interest.
Edit: I just realized that using the “show desktop version” on mobile browsers is a solution—but it’s frustrating to have to resort to that.
The lack of support on mobile browsers though makes offering a simple webpage that they can update themselves a no-go.
I have to agree with you, the neglected (Android) app, for example, is one of the reasons for me why I’m still switching between Notion and Coda and can’t finally decide to use one of the two platforms exclusively.
For me, the main source of annoyance with Coda on mobile is the frustrating slowness, namely of loading table views. If a page contains multiple subpages, which in turn contain table views, then Coda seems to load all table views at once in the background, making loading of one of these subpages extremely slow.
Another reason is the non-responsive behavior of images that are located in layout columns, which I have already mentioned elsewhere.
Or the display of calendars on mobile, which is only possible as a list, which can become confusing if you have set a lot of future appointments. Notion does this smarter: it shows a table grid with markers for days on which appointments are set, starting with the current month, and a tap on the day opens the task.
I would be happy if Coda took its mobile apps more seriously when they are indispensable for daily work. Not everyone sits at a desktop screen the whole day, that does not correspond to the reality of working with such a versatile application as Coda.
In terms of layout, typography and page/table structure for me Coda has always been the sexiest app of all. That’s why it annoys me that many suggestions and requests for improvements and corrections for the mobile app, as well as for the web application, are ignored by the developers for a very long time or seemingly forever.
I really hope that Coda doesn’t lose sight of the details while it prepares for the flight to Mars (cooperation with Snowflake, launching more and more AI features).
Just adding on, a lot of my clients have had me build out Apple Shortcuts that connect via API to make a better interface that doesn’t take forever to load.
Hoping Coda 5.0 introduces a whole new mobile and tablet experience.
Can’t agree more. We’ve even gotten to the point that we have had to actually PROHIBIT use of mobile logins all together. Not only is it just bad experience, it’s actually DANGEROUS to use.
The Android app is mostly useless for our needs. It’s so unpredictable and so different from our desktop version, that to even get close to being usable, we have deleted the app altogether and just login via Chrome mobile with desktop emulator turned on. This makes the doc look more like our desktop doc, but then it presents its own issues:
It seems like every time I’m forced use it in an emergency, something will get moved around inadvertently. You gotta be extremely careful when simply scrolling otherwise you’ll select/drag something (e.g. pages, columns) and they get totally lost in other random parts of your document.
I’ve spent 16 hour days for months in the desktop version and know my way around most every corner and shortcut. But with just 30 seconds navigating around the mobile app or Android Chrome site–even with extreme carefulness–no matter what, I’ll end up dragging something unintended to somewhere else. I end up having to always go back to the desktop to even see what even happened. (I haven’t found an undo button on mobile. Is there one?)
If I as the developer can’t navigate my own doc that I’ve created without messing it up on my phone, how I can ever expect anyone who’s not techy to ever use it?