Replies on Riot Mobile

[lampholder]

Michael has implemented replies in Riot.im web:

Replying to a message:

Viewing a sequence of replies:

We want to replicate this functionality in iOS and Android (though not necessarily the exact same UX).

Much the same as with sticker packs, I think we should tackle this by:

• making sure replies can render sensibly on mobile first, then
• implementing the UX to send replies from mobile

[lampholder]

Without making any changes to iOS, replies render like this:

It's actually not too bad - there's no left 'quote' bar, but that's true for quoted messages, too.

Clicking on the 'In reply to' doesn't do anything on iOS.

There is (obviously) no way to initiate a reply on iOS today.

[lampholder]

On Android, you get the left 'quote' bar, but clicking 'In reply to' does something a bit unexpected - it loads up a 'Search' page (and returns some results), but there are no search terms highlighted so I don't really know what it was searching for:

There is (obviously) no way to initiate a reply on Android today, either.

[lampholder]

The event spec discussion document is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FZsvodn2C0iKJDtn-8y8IPwOa96ixoJejK3gMLVOXHM/edit. Michael is making a summary document (will be pasted here when completed.)

The event format definition doc is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BPd4lBrooZrWe_3s_lHw_e-Dydvc7bXbm02_sV2k6Sc/edit

[lampholder]

So before we worry about speccing out the UX of a fully functioning replies feature in Riot Mobile, what is the minimum we can do to unblock releasing replies on riot.im/app?

Options:

• Option 1
  • make android and iOS both use the unformatted message body for replies (which will include the full message text of both the reply and the message being replied to)
• Option 2
  • fix the missing vertical bar on iOS (for quotes and replies)
  • make clicking the link on Android do nothing
• Option 3
  • fix the missing vertical bar on iOS (for quotes and replies)
  • make clicking the link on Android and iOS scroll to the right message in history

@manuroe do you have thoughts on the relative difficulty of implementing these?

[lampholder]

It sounds like Option 3 might be more effort than it's worth. So let's add:

• Option 4
  • fix the vertical bar
  • make clicking the link expand the replies thread message by message (like on riot web)

@manuroe if that's doesn't have any particular problems on mobile then I can mock up some UX for it