I am self-hosting a Gitea instance for all my coding work. Live personal projects, coding work, archived code. In fact, not only coding but most writing in general. Books and courses included. Yeah, these days, it is possible to write the course as well.

Browsing F-Droid lately I have stumbled upon the git-touch project. It caught my attention because it is a client for Gitea as well. Up until this point, I was only aware of the GitNex, which I like a lot. It feels lightweight but at the same time it has many features I care about.

I do not host my repositories on GitHub for various reasons, but I still do use the account there. Mostly for filling issues, but sometimes for occasional contributions and also for watching releases. For these reasons, I was also keeping my official GitHub mobile app in the phone as well. But git-touch might aim to be one-stop shop mobile app for most code hosting solutions. So not only Gitea and GitHub but GitLab, BitBucket, gogs and also gitee (I was not aware of the latter, but apparently serves customers in Asia).

After installing git-touch, I was pleasantly surprised. I must admit it made me feel like it is lighting fast! But the impression did not last long. I have found that it lacks too many features for Gitea account to be useful. For instance, as of writing, the release v1.12.3 lacks a repository search function in Gitea account. I had to scroll the repository in question to see the details. Also, some repositories could not load the code, even a tiny ones.

To be fair, git-touch UI for GitHub account offered basically everything I expected. Compared to Gitea, it had a toolbar on the bottom with issues, search and many other tools. I could definitely imagine using git-touch for my, rather limited GitHub work.

As a side note, the maintainer of the git-touch, user pd4d10 is a member of the organization ByteDance. The organization is rather famous, or infamous, depending on who you ask. It thus can be a positive or a negative flag for you, so consider using your own opinion on this matter.

Conclusion

A very quick glance at git-touch mobile app, using it with Gitea and GitHub account made it clear to me, that it is not yet ready for my Gitea workflow yet. For now, I am sticking with the proven GitNex to be able to quickly access my repositories on the go. I will keep an eye on the git-touch, as it already has the required features I find useful for the GitHub account, so they can appear on the Gitea side of the app soon, depending on the roadmap, which I did not check yet. At that time, it could become a useful tool.

This is a 4th post of #100daystooffload.