As I am incorporating mobile devices in more of my day to day workflows, I am experiencing a lot of friction while doing desktop-work on mobile phones. My main struggle has been in writing and navigating structured and long form documents, which is excruciating on phones. Now I shouldn't complain since one argument would go like "Long form documents are not the right content type for this form factor. We have reels, vertical videos, deck of slides, etc. that are better suited to small devices". But there will always be important articles, structured documents, reports, etc. and we need to have good systems for them too instead of letting every meaningful content devolve to 10 second bites.
Consider scrolling. In my attempt to make Org-roam notes more accessible on my Android device, I have set up a plain text edit mode for Org markdown. It works well for tweet like content but anything larger and meaningful makes it extremely hard to navigate with just scrolling. A simple scroll bar is surprisingly useless in mobile devices other than acting as good indicator of the overall position. Many contact and photo apps augment scroll bars with indicators like the initial of first names and month-year of the photos, respectively1. This is a step towards the right direction and I believe we need to bring in more of the structures of document to navigation in general.
In programming, we have extensive set of tools and shortcuts for navigating structures. Almost everyone I know does something more than line by line movements in their editors or IDEs. I recently moved a little in this direction by building a button that acts like an analog stick and allows me to jump through levels of headings in the Org file that I am editing. Here is how it works:
HX button works like an analog stick for structured scrolling.
Right-left movements change the levels (H1, H2, and so on) to navigate, while up-down triggers the actual jumps.
Pardon the α-ness of this feature.
You might have to maximize the video to see clearly.
Many of my notes are large files with multiple levels of headings since I also work on them on my desktop and this feature has been really helpful.
Overall this makes me curious about the state of research on mobile interfaces for similar work. I believe there are better mechanisms waiting to become mainstream, but also a lot of gaps to be filled.