[InitialBP]

It's not just an annoyance, it makes your site literally unusable on a mobile device. What if I urgently need to access some details of my account and don't have laptop access. If I check "load desktop site" then load the site and let me deal with the broken UI.

This is a ridiculous "feature" and the fact that you are defending something like this is a major turn off on ever using this product. What other hill would you be "willing to die on" for some seemingly miniscule yet exceptionally annoying feature.

[rapind]

It's open source, not a product. You're coming off as entitled, and he can die on whatever hill he wants to die on. You can fork it, and even submit a PR that would do something like click a button to continue anyways (on a smaller resolution).

[mushyhammer]

Maybe rude but not entitled. Nobody here cares about the product specifically, but it’s shooting itself in the foot and saying it’s a feature; that doesn’t sit well with many.

https://xkcd.com/386/

[monkey_monkey]

Incredibly entitled actually.

> Nobody here cares about the product specifically,

Citation needed.

> but it’s shooting itself in the foot and saying it’s a feature; that doesn’t sit well with many.

That's their problem, no one else's.

[InitialBP]

They don't mean literally nobody cares about the product, just that this conversation isn't necessarily related directly to the product but more about design in general. My original point is just that it's a design that locks people into using the app with a very specific medium and it locks people out of accessing it on another medium with no details about why.

That's a pattern that most people would agree they don't like and my comment is meant to be a criticism of that.

> That's their problem, no one else's.

It was posted in a public forum for discussion, is it really wrong to critique or praise the product in this setting?

[mushyhammer]

Nah you’re wrong on all counts. If a product makes bad decisions and then the author posts it on HN what do they expect exactly?

[Athenodoros]

I appreciate rapind's point so I won't comment along those lines, but I think it's worth explicitly saying that the UI doesn't work within a certain screen width: it would display nonsensically, and I'd rather display an explanation to someone new to it (and the link to the GitHub ReadMe, which hopefully helps a little) rather than complete garbage. I definitely don't consider this a "feature" - I think it's just the least bad option, given the lack of a proper mobile view. It's also the case that the idea of "urgent access" doesn't work so well without data syncing - I generally wouldn't expect people to copy the export file to their mobile manually, in which case this won't actually have the data from another device.

It's probably true that a summary of features or something would be more helpful for those coming across it anew. In this case though, this is mostly for my own benefit, and it's explicitly out of scope to make money off this: I'd prefer to spend time on additional features for users (ie. me!), rather than implementing something like a product showcase or proper mobile view. Hopefully it's useful/interesting enough when it can be viewed properly, that it's worth coming back to.

[InitialBP]

I can appreciate that solution. Admittedly I didn't know anything about the app since I don't have access to any device to view it.