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Long answer short: No, you can't get a complex webapp resolved responsively with all its complexity on a mobile.

Two reasons for that:

1. The mobile browser (excluding the iPad/larger tablets) are yet to achieve the level or even meet standards, for that matter, where a really good developer could go an dive and into creating a complex webapp.

2. Even if point no. 1 is met by vendors (which is questionable) then also there is a significant difference between the way people interact by sitting on their desktops and on their mobiles when on the go.

That said, nice piece of work.

BTW we do a lot of this type of work too - i.e. trying to achieve a fairly complex webapp for all screens. We don't use Zurb or Bootstrap, rather have our own custom CSS framework built from ground up. I'm hoping for better support from the vendors soon given there is more competition. It surely will get better.



You're going to have to explain point 1 a little better because it reads like you're saying that mobile browsers don't have feature rich and standards compliant engines. And that mobile browsers differ from tablet browsers. Neither of which is true.


Top off my head (though people have already negatively voted my opinion) here are a few:

1. File uploads on iOS is not supported as per standards. Android is making a difference here.

2. HTML5 Full-Screen API is not supported on mobile browsers. On the iPad, Safari doesn't switch to full-screen mode at all, whereas on the iPhone it does.

3. Available memory is very very limited. About 5mb or so. So you can't load too many images on the same page or it'd crash. Not even a complex webapp to be frank.

4. Number of ports per connection on mobile browser are fewer than on a desktop browser. So a complicated/heavy webapp isn't going to make a cut.

There are other serious limitations too.

Like you can't tell the browser to remain in landscape or portrait via your site if you wanted to. CSS properties like position:fixed or z-index and binding of events on the layer with highest z-index is buggy or simply doesn't work.

Other options like raw in-line base64 images inside CSS are not rendered properly etc. etc. etc. The list could go on ... :)


Ah, I understand your frustration now. Thanks for the clarification.


up voted , your concerns are genuine.




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