Fibery is Awesome, but we do miss mobile and offline. Here's why

Ideas & Features
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First I want to stress the the capital A in Awesome in the title is not a typo. I do believe Fibery is a great product.

We have built a collaboration platform for manufacturers, something that in a couple of years will grow to be very similar to an ERP system, but for the modern age.

We use Fibery, to track tasks, projects, and time spent on them.

We track decisions made on how the customers will work with our platform.

We list all the integrations we develop for each of them, tracking which software we’re integrating with, which entities are being passed around and how, etc.

We’re also trying to use it as a CRM, tracking deals, opportunities with new prospects

It’s an extremely valuable knowledge base, that is helping us to keep everything under one roof, both for internal processes and to control what happens at our customers

HOWEVER, we often need to use it on the go, while we’re at exhibitions getting to know new prospects or at a customer site doing consulting and training. In these cases two things become critical and Fibery, unfortunately, not only doesn’t have them, but they seem to be very low on priority: I’m talking about mobile use and offline access.

Multiple times I’ve found myself having to take notes in another app while at a customer because the wifi would not work and the speed and agility I have in using Fibery on desktop simply isn’t there on a smartphone (and I have an 6.7" phone so it’s not small).

Similarly when we’re at exhibitions and we need to quickly input new prospects data or check out the status of a deal in the car right before going in to meet a new customer, it’s simply a pain.

I know other products do not have the same flexibility when it comes to mix structured and unstructured data, but having to work around that may in a few months become less cumbersome than not being able to access/update the data in those scenarios which happen on a regular basis.

This is not to complain, I understand you guys have your focus and target audience who may not have the same needs, but because I like Fibery so much I felt it a duty to express why we may need to switch.

Thanks for bringing Fibery to the world!

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+1 for this.

The mobile website does work, but it’s far from optimal. But it’s much better than it used to be.

I think I use Fibery about 10% of the time on mobile site, but it will probably be 25% if there was an app.

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Yes an app for our daily users that arent always workign on laptops would be great; allowing them to quickly check their tasks or store an idea etc

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Since this is primarily about mobile (with Offline as a component of that), there is already a pretty highly-voted request here: Native Apps (Apple, Android, etc.)
Perhaps this will get merged there? Or would you prefer separate discussion on some particular aspect?

I do find myself wondering if there would be some commonly agreeable set of minimum features that would meet the most basic, core needs of a majority of people and could help Fibery team focus on a more manageable implementation. Several other PKM apps I know have gone this route, starting with a simpler mobile app and potentially expanding later. Tana did, and I believe maybe Obsidian too. In both cases from my recollection it was more of a “capture-oriented” approach. For Fibery maybe the key things are some simple approach to “capturing” and “reference” (find and read info). What sacrifices could be made to facilitate this? Would they be useful removals of complexity that could make it easier for Fibery team to implement?

I know for example if I look at the current Fibery mobile UI there are probably 10 things I would just remove right-off (icons, functions, etc.; great example is the field manager!). Now I know the current mobile view is the way it is probably because it did not take a lot of work to just put “Fibery as it is now but formatted for mobile”, i.e. they did not have to deal with removing things. It’s just a reformatting of the existing web UI. But when reimplementing stuff in a native mobile app I suspect it might be the opposite problem, and having fewer things to add could be advantageous. And even if that’s not exactly the case, the design and UI/UX decisions and work needed to accommodate all existing functions are certainly burdensome and challenging. Mobile constraints often dictate some creative solutions and creating entirely new approaches to things that a desktop app doesn’t require at all. The less Fibery team needs to do that the better.

Anyway, just something to think about and perhaps discuss further. If those who want a mobile app can collectively decide on some reasonable subset of functionality that would make a “minimum viable” mobile app, that might move the initiative forward and allow it to move up Fibery’s internal priority list. Just keep in mind: it needs to be minimum viable! The absolute fewest functions it could have that would make it useful to you. :smile:

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That was exactly my thought.

If I could only create new entities and open existing ones via search, I would be so happy :heart:

I created a ‘hack’ to quickly add items on mobile.

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It’s a list view which I pinned on my home screen. I’ve added the databases in which I mostly create entities on my mobile.

All entities that are created in that view are also on a ‘Braindump & inbox page’.

But an app (or mobile friendly website) with the new Create anything from sidebar option would be a lot better :heart_eyes:

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Yeah, I just found myself also wondering if the work around “Create things more easily/quickly” is taking mobile into account in any specific way…

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For us, the offline capability would be huge. Almost our entire team is remote, and about half are working in areas with minimal infrastructure (and also travel a lot). It’s not uncommon for people to lose network connectivity for a time. We get around that by working outside of Fibery in communication apps, office docs, and emails, but the majority of this could shift to Fibery if there were offline capabilities. This would help all our knowledge to more consistently be found within Fibery.

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Mobile App will come in some future.
Chances for Offline version are very low. Fibery was not designed with this in mind, and implementation will be very very challenging. I just don’t want to set any false expectations soon.

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Ya, I figured the chances for offline were low. This sort of feature seems to be relatively uncommon among online productivity solutions, and I realize that in today’s connected age the times when people in developed areas are disconnected are increasingly few. I appreciate the realistic outlook, and I still feel like Fibery is a great tool.

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Would it be similarly challenging to just have a read-only offline mode? And @Michael_Ichter would that meet at least some of your needs?

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I agree! This has been discussed a lot. As @YvetteLans mentioned, I think capturing and viewing are ideal.

Tana did this perfectly.

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Partially, but only a very small part. I foresee a read-only offline mode only having a minimal impact to people’s current workflow. Those with constant internet access will continue to use Fibery extensively, and those with minimal internet access will continue to primarily use other tools while only using Fibery as an occasional reference (but perhaps referring to it more frequently).

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I’m currently using Fibery on mobile in chrome and I think it is quite there. For start I think that webview app with better navigation items would be sufficient for now. I think I will do it using AppMySite for now but native app with widgets would be awesome.

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Im using Hermit to pin Fibery links to my Android start screen. Its definitely not a replacement for an app, but it helps me to keep it more accessible.

Hermit — Lite Apps Browser - Apps op Google Play

Having a proper mobile app would be nice, i use MS Loop right now as a mobile note-taking app (as it works quite well for that), and being able to do that on fibery on mobile would be nice