Currently Phabricator on mobile has a few noticable problems:
- On low-end phones, performance is not that great. This is mostly a problem with how fast mobile browsers can render the content, but it's noticeable to the point where it can take a second or more to load an individual page.
- On mobile or regional networks (particularly apparent in Australia where mobile connectivity is reasonably poor and may not be continuous) pages can fail to load while navigating.
- On mobile devices, Aphlict won't work at all because Flash is not available.
Even if real-time notifications can be worked by some mechanism other than Aphlict, the first two issues still pose a problem in terms of responsiveness and offline support for Conpherence, which for a messaging system are reasonably important on mobile.
Now in this case we aren't talking about implementing anything other than Conpherence. A viable option might to be to ship a stripped down, local HTML file and CSS that ships the required styles, and use the native application to drive behaviour, offline storage and real-time connectivity and notifications. This way we can re-use the existing styles from Phabricator, without requiring the mobile device to load and reload the styles or HTML from the internet.