GitHub now lets you add code comments from your phone

The team over at GitHub just made it easier for coders to collaborate on the go.

GitHub developer Jake Boxer announced a new feature that will allow coders to add comments to files via their smartphones.

Smartphone users can now simply tap on the line of code that they want to comment on. That will let them start or add to a discussion in a pull request or a commit (for the uninitiated, pull requests and commits show changes to a single coding project). Before the update, people on phones could look at code, but had to switch to the desktop version of the site in order to add comments.

“There’s nothing more frustrating than being unable to do what you want on a website just because you’re accessing it from your phone,” Boxer said in an email to VentureBeat.

The collaborative software-building platform officially launched a mobile-optimized website in July 2013. The GitHub team reasoned in a blog post that they often clicked through to GitHub repositories through Facebook, Twitter, or email apps, so it made more sense to mobile-optimize the existing website rather than build a native app.

Boxer added that the current mobile site bucked JavaScript-heavy mobile design trends, relying for the most part on only HTML and CSS to create a snappier and more stable browsing experience for users.

GitHub did, however, release a native app for Android in 2012 that let people track progress on their projects. And while no official iOS app exists, third-party developers have been filling the void by creating GitHub clients on their own. A host of free and paid third-party GitHub clients have cropped up for iOS, including CodeHub, NapCat, and SuitHub.