Live data from Hacker News

Replit Mobile App

blog.replit.com

61–70 of 212 posts

Re: Replit Mobile App

#62
I read on another comment by a high school teacher that many of their students write essays on mobile. It seems that the younger generations are mobile-digital native, as opposed to desktop-digital native.

I don't expect desktop apps to be completely replaced by mobile apps, but the migration of some specific use cases is interesting to watch:

- Maps and navigation

- Email / instant messaging

- Photo editing

- Video editing

- Online shopping

- Banking and accounting

- and now, coding

Re: Replit Mobile App

#63
It's honestly impressive the amount of coding that young people do from their phones. There is a very healthy healthy community of those who have some solid environments on their (mostly Android) devices. Whats funny is that this was the dream of the One Laptop per Child non-profit that was solved by the flush of ARM devices instead of donor dollars (ftw free market!)

I work at Railway and a lot of our younger, international users use Railway from their phones (usually in class) and it's quite impressive. Honestly, such a fan of Repl.it its why I am a customer of their service and this is a step in the right direction for the dream of the universal runtime.

Re: Replit Mobile App

#64
I use Repl.it web interface for programming on the sofa from my Android phone. There's various bugs in the editor but it works well enough.

I currently subscribe to repl.it. the freedom to quickly create a Java or Python project is really easy and helps me work on problems where I want to write a small amount of code that is at the idea stage.

Re: Replit Mobile App

#65
post #4

Presently on iOS it appears this is an iPhone app that doesn't scale to iPad screen dimensions, even when expanded. It's using between a third and a half of the available viewport in landscape orientation. That said, it appears to work pretty well in side-by-side mode, concurrently with another app, but it still uses about half the available viewport in this mode. I expect this will get addressed PDQ.

I think their main focus is allowing people to code who only have a mobile phone, so my guess is iPad is a lower priority (because most people with iPads have full size computers they can use instead).

Making it scale properly to iPad screen sizes and doing nothing else shouldn't be too hard to do and would make it a lot more useful for people. Even if they don't want to spend the time developing an iPad specific layout, no reason not to use the full iPad screen with the current layout.

Re: Replit Mobile App

#66
post #26

I'm bullish on this because mobile (and web) development is ridiculously overcomplicated to a beginner. I think it's a common misconception that coding/logic is difficult. I find the development setup and deployment to be much more complicated. As evidence, take a look at the impressive workarounds that citizen developers use to make things work in an easy environment like Excel. A keyboard and mouse probably solve m…

> I find the development setup and deployment to be much more complicated

My understanding is that is the problem repl.it is trying to solve. In a sentence: think about your code and not your environment.

My curmudgeonly self thinks that there are deeper problems and externalities that programming on a phone/tablet or in the web only exasperate. Computer literacy is shockingly poor among the incoming generation of people who have only used mobile devices, WebUIs, and maybe a Chromebook - and that's not the fault of people or technology, but the business models that only succeed by locking users into platforms and hiding details of how those platforms work. The issue with programming on mobile or through something like repl.it is that it hides too much - at the end of the day, tinkering with computers requires computers that can be tinkered with and software systems that can be introspected.

Re: Replit Mobile App

#67

I’m seeing a lot of responses clarifying that this app is designed for folks who either can’t afford to code from a computer (for various reasons outside of their control) or want to quickly prototype ideas or make changes to existing projects. To better illustrate my skepticism (and bias), I’d like to invoke an imperfect analogy to writing novels. Imagine a mobile notes app that touts an impressive list of features…

At least one novel I'm aware of that was traditionally published was written on a phone, I think a Blackberry, mostly during commutes.

https://bgr.com/general/the-novel-on-the-f-train-an-intervie...

Re: Replit Mobile App

#68

I’m seeing a lot of responses clarifying that this app is designed for folks who either can’t afford to code from a computer (for various reasons outside of their control) or want to quickly prototype ideas or make changes to existing projects. To better illustrate my skepticism (and bias), I’d like to invoke an imperfect analogy to writing novels. Imagine a mobile notes app that touts an impressive list of features…

At least one novel I'm aware of that was traditionally published was written on a phone, I think a Blackberry, mostly during commutes. https://bgr.com/general/the-novel-on-the-f-train-an-intervie...

For sure, hence an imperfect analogy, and I have no doubt some cool projects will come out of this replit mobile app too. I just don’t see it becoming the weapon of choice for most production development environments.

Re: Replit Mobile App

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least one novel I'm aware of that was traditionally published was written on a phone, I think a Blackberry, mostly during commutes. https://bgr.com/general/the-novel-on-the-f-train-an-intervie...

For sure, hence an imperfect analogy, and I have no doubt some cool projects will come out of this replit mobile app too. I just don’t see it becoming the weapon of choice for most production development environments.

Oh yeah I wouldn't want to do anything serious on a phone period, well with the caveat I find it weirdly easier to write rough drafts of poetry on my phone and I have no idea why.
Post reply on HN