For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Aditi - a Product Manager on the Forge platform. Our team is currently exploring Mobile support for Forge apps, and we’d love to hear from you. Your feedback will inform what we build, and what kind of features on Forge mobile to prioritise. Let us know what you think using the polls below.
It is important that my apps work on Jira/Confluence mobile
Strongly agree - it’s crucial to the user experience
Agree - it’s preferable in the user experience
Don’t agree - it’s not required in the user experience
0voters
The level of effort I expect to apply to support my apps on Mobile is…
Moderate - we want to tailor our experiences to their respective platforms
Little - willing to make minor changes, however the cross-platform compatibility should predominantly handled by Forge
None - apps should be automatically compatible
0voters
If you feel strongly about any of the above, or you’d like to suggest something different, then add a comment below and let us know why. Of course, if you’re more comfortable, you can DM me or book some time to have a chat!
Does the second question include all forms of UI: Forge UI and custom UI?
In the case of Forge UI mobile support may be much easier if not trivial because Atlassian could adjust the rendering to be mobile-friendly. On the other hand, for Custom UI with AtlasKit the required effort could not only be moderate but significant.
@tbinna@james.dellow thanks for the feedback! This is the kind of thing we want to hear more about.
The second question includes all forms of UI but you’re right, this is an important distinction that needs to be made in regard to the level of effort required.
Would you be able to elaborate on what ‘trivial’ vs ‘moderate’ or ‘significant’ effort would look like for you? What tasks would you expect needs to be done by yourself (if any) to support a Forge app on mobile? And, what tasks should be handled by the Forge platform?
@AditiVenkatesh In general, I do not think mobile support for Forge apps is a simple question of making it compatible. If this is really a concern, I think it should be addressed from the ground up. Today, I don’t think many vendors have mobile in mind when they design apps. Atlassian would have to first lay the foundation for that. But I also do not see how mobile-friendly apps would have anything to do with Forge specifically (apart from the point on Forge UI).
The below is all hypothetical because I think very few Marketplace partners are actually running Forge apps at this stage - at least not us.
By trivial I mean no changes from the Marketplace partner if Forge UI is used because Forge UI could be seen as merely a description of the UI. Atlassian could adjust the rendering of the Forge UI components to make it mobile-friendly.
For Custom UI (and Connect for that matter), I would say it depends on the partner’s implementation and which modules they use. To be honest, I think for the most part Atlassian’s design guidelines do not consider mobile, and AtlasKit does not have any utilities that would encourage responsive app design/layouts (e.g. media queries). Maybe this is not a concern AtlasKit wants to address, however many UI libraries do provide such utilities. This is why I was saying making Custom UIs responsive and mobile-friendly may mean a significant overhead because the UI potentially needs to be re-designed with mobile in mind.
I’d add that also there is no parity between integration points in the desktop browser experience and mobile right now. My current Connect app only works in the mobile app if used as a macro and the experience isn’t great. But the option that adds it as a custom page isn’t even accessible and if added as a custom overview page, it’s ignored.
Trivial in Forge UI might mean picking appropriate adaptive configurations.
Moderate in Custom UI would be similar to building a modern web experience to be responsive/adaptive. But I’d expect Atlassian to provide a fit for purpose framework to do it efficiently and consistently.
@tbinna@james.dellow thank you once again for your in-depth feedback. We will take this onboard as we continue to explore what mobile support for Forge apps will look like.
@james.dellow we are currently investigating how we will support extension points in the mobile experience. Aside from adding custom pages, if there are any other extension points or use cases in your web app which you’d like to see on mobile, please let me know. Alternatively, you can book in some time for us to have a more in depth chat about this via this link.
Since I just got another customer support ticket about asking for our macros to render on mobile (I’d say it’s in the top 3 when customers trial our app).
I think you should provide the render context for this and developers take care of the rest, we could render a basic storage-format compatible version. Same as we do for pdf-exports etc.
We definitely need this for both Connect and Forge!
It’s great to hear you’re interested in rendering apps on mobile. We are actively developing support for mobile so stay tuned for more updates in coming months. In the meantime, you can also keep an eye on our developer roadmap here.
I’ve also created a request in our feedback project where you can provide further details or stay up to date with our progress.
The team and I would love to chat with you more regarding this. You can book in some time for us to have a more in depth chat about this via this link.
