A while back we produced our first “mobile specific” web app, which was produced with Jquery Mobile. This framework seems to make building forms etc so easy for mobile. But after we did a bit of testing on some mobile devices, we soon realized this pretty ui is not without issues. We have various input controls that would simply refuse to work correctly, and even had a date picker control that would… somehow?… actually crash the browser. After a lot of headache and retesting, and removing anything beyond just the most basic of input controls, we finally got things working well enough to release it.
But now I’m finding that, not only was our experience no uncommon, it seems that many others have not done the testing we did and discover the bugs… and have actually deployed production websites using JQM… that simply do not work. I first noticed this with a popular ecommerce package that released mobile extensions- browsing certain pages just simply did not work. So customers who had deployed this option would actually see their mobile sales drop a bunch, instead of improve them as they should. I’ve even seen some analysis that “mobile traffic is junk”, which I’m not convinced is derived from some similiar issues to this.
And just in the last two weeks, I’ve personally encountered 2 other production sites that are having serious mobile website issues that make them unusable to many mobile users.
Is Jquery Mobile doing more harm than good?