Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Could someone explain to me why would anyone use GitHub on their phones rather than on a desktop computer? I can't seem to come up with a situation in which I'd reasonably need to interrupt anything I'm doing in order to check GitHub on my phone.


I was out of country without my workstation laptop and the company I was working for encountered the biggest fire of its relatively short existence, causing an all-hands-on-deck situation. In a pinch I helped by changing an nginx configuration and scaling settings on a mission-critical service from my phone in order to be more accepting of exceptionally-long request timeouts while the company chased down the root cause.

Nowadays I have slack on my phone and click links to open PRs occasionally.


Let’s set aside the word “need” and just go with “want.” Sometimes I want to use GitHub on my phone because I’m in bed and want to read over some code, or I’m on the bus to work in the morning and I want to get a head start on a PR a coworker sent me. I don’t really understand why GitHub is a crazier thing to do on one’s phone than, well, anything else really.


I find that it's nice to review pull requests or just browse through repositories/code on your phone if you don't have access to your laptop.


> Could someone explain to me why would someone use GitHub on their phones rather than on a desktop computer?

I think I don't understand the question; how is github's app different than e.g. airbnb's?


How is it not totally different?

People use Airbnb to rent apartments and people use GitHub to develop and share source code for software.


Let me be more precise: "how is github's app [existence] different than e.g. airbnb's?".

The grandparent asked a question, my point is that you could replace "github" with any other company that keeps both a web app and a mobile app:

> > Could someone explain to me why would someone use GitHub on their phones rather than on a desktop computer?


Triaging notifications will be my main use for it - doing so on mobile before wasn’t great, and the new UI is even worse on mobile.

Tried the app for this and it seems great!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: