REReinmar·Apr 3, 2019
We've been doing quite a lot of research around mobile support in the early phase of working on CKEditor 5. We knew from our past experience that on mobile devices (especially smaller ones) you need a dedicated UI, rather than a responsive version of the same UI that you use on the desktop. When the software keyboard is visible (+ when you have autocompletion bar above the keyboard) there's really not much space for your UI and the text that you want to edit. It means that you need really good control over what's happening on the screen in order to be able to implement a reliable UI.
Anyway, we had big plans for mobile support in CKEditor 5. Then we started doing more research [1] and it turned out there are critical issues with how WebKit works. You can guess, you can try, but with a tone of hacks you still won't be able to guarantee a s
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mooth UI and great UX.
Right now, we're in a state where:
* after spending several months on it, text editing is well supported on iOS and Android (including spellcheck and stuff) – we don't get any bug reports recently about that part,
* the default UI is not working great on smaller devices.
The sad part is – we don't have any bigger plans to address the latter. We have some smaller ideas for making the current UI more responsive, but there will still be fundamental issues that you will face when using it:
* The conflict between the native UI (the balloons/panels with paste/copy/cut/bold/italic) and the custom editor UI. I've been bringing that to the W3C's attention since 2015 and nothing happened since then (most recent topics: [2], [3]). Right now, I don't have the funds anymore to lobby for this (neither have anyone else, apparently), so those topics seem to be completely stale.
* Inability to display your UI and implement functions like scrolling to the caret in a reliable way on WebKit due to its broken viewport mechanics [4]. I even talked about this with one of the Apple devs responsible for the current behavior and he agreed that there may be a problem (a good first step :D), but I got literally zero feedback after the last year's TPAC in Lyon when I presented this issue.
* And more...
IMO, it's due to those issues that we haven't seen a single editor (implementing more than some really basic functions) with a good and stable UX on both iOS and Android. Every solution I saw was flawed in one way or another. I'm not saying that it's completely impossible to build such a solution, but rather that, taken all the obstacles and moderate demand (desktop is still the main platform for rich-text editing), the ROI seems too low for anyone to invest enough in it.
Anyway, feel free to contact me (e.g. via https://twitter.com/reinmarpl) if you'd like to discuss this more.
[1] https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5-design/issues/149
[2] https://github.com/w3c/editing/issues/176
[3] https://github.com/w3c/editing/issues/182 (my presentation from last year's TPAC)
[4] https://gist.github.com/Reinmar/91c70d2882523f47da7c49805042...