Hi Rlogan – good points well made.

On customer thoughts – agree entirely. Think I have only ever seen 1 windows phone in the wild – but I have had 60+ complaints from two sites built on Enfold. Both business / corporate sites and both with a primarily UK/EU audience (where it only takes 500 visitors for the site to fail for 120 of them).

I, as seems to be the case with others here, assumed that a market leading theme like Enfold would have mobile covered out of the box (as the rest of the players in this space do) and when I my first user complaints came in 5-6 months ago the response on this forum was “we’re working on this, please be patient”.

Had the issue been made clear I, for one, would have moved right on as I primarily build business / enterprise sites for which proper mobile support is a fundamental requirement / assumption (just takes one exec at the client with a Win Phone to spoil the party).

So stating clearly that Enfold fails on Windows Phones and that they are entirely unsupported or clarifying the unsupported elements at a pre sales point as you suggest is a must. Without it customers are going to continue to develop sites on Enfold only to run into this issue during the production cycle or post launch costing them time, money and credibility. They may quite rightly feel a little peeved as a result.

On Vendor thoughts – afraid not fond of MS – they have been a thorn in the side of web developers for as long as I can remember and catering to the unique requirements of their browsers is something we’ve all had to deal with at one time or another.

Having spent some time on this I can confirm that debugging mobile IE is a real pain – no code view / debugging support available on traditional testing platforms like browserstack so short of fumbling in the dark the only option seems to be getting hold of a physical device and installing a view source app. Even then hardly a debugging tool but an idea of how the code is rendering is at least a start. Not sure if other tools exist for members of MSDN (or whatever they call it these days).

At the end of the day we buy in to platforms like Enfold to simplify the development process and it is the responsibility of the theme developers (who after all make a lot of money from them) to stay ahead of browser curves imho. I’m too busy selling their products, bundled with my time, to clients whom I want to be happy with the result.

It may be that Enfold’s business model is geared towards small business owners building a single site – if your site gets 10 hits a week you may not be too bothered about the 0.3 visitors who cannot use it – and is not geared towards developers at all. If that is the case I think they are missing a big opportunity (I for one would be happy to pay a premium for developer as opposed to consumer support).

But what we really need right now, Kriesi please, is either a solution, an announcement that a fix scheduled for the next release, or a categorical statement that Enfold is not, and will never be, compatible with Windows Phone default browser so that we can make an informed decision as to whether to hold on or move on without further delay.

Hi Wizard247 – I’m afraid my polite pleas for information or any sort of guidance to support an independent investigation into what I consider a fundamental and major issue with Enfold have been met with silence (which in itself raises alarms on a support forum).

In response to your post on the other thread (http://goo.gl/K55qlT):

I too only found out the hard way after assuming that a leading theme in 2016 would have mobile covered – and without Win Phone support it is not a mobile friendly theme IMHO. I agree – there should be a big red flag on the sales page warning of this.

In terms of your options:

As far as I can tell from a Windows Phone search on these forums they have been aware of this for at least two years – initially responses were along the lines of “we don’t have a Win Phone to test on” which evolved to “Windows Phone is not officially supported yet, we’re working on this, please be patient” before ending on “we don’t support Windows Phone and don’t say anywhere that we do”. Well you don’t say anywhere that you don’t either!

So I don’t think you will find an earlier version of the theme that will work (and there are numerous reasons – from security to compatibility – you should not do this anyway).

In terms of a fix – I spent a week of developer time everything from simple css to js browser sniffing to resolve the background issue without success. For whatever reason Win Phone is not falling back to the Avia mobile styling as it should but without any support from the people who wrote the code here we were simply unable to proceed further.

Whether or not Kriesi and team are taking this seriously, actively looking into it, or are planning to address it anytime soon is anybody’s guess as they will provide no information here. My guess would be that, having ignored Win Phone for so long hoping it would just go away, they have been left with a low level conflict in the core Avia builder code and that a fix would cause disruption to their wider user base – but I sincerely hope that I am wrong.

So without any transparency or support for this issue I’m afraid my advice would be that you need to look elsewhere if business users with windows phones (and that’s a whopping 25% here in the UK) are in your audience. Which doesn’t help you much at this point I know.

As far as I am aware Enfold is the only major theme / framework with this issue. I can confirm that X theme, Divi builder from Elegant themes, and Beaver Builder all play well with Win Phone but there will be a learning curve and a ground up rebuild will be required.

The irony is that Enfold excels at what it does – for example a full width background section with equal height columns with content independent vertical centering is impossible to achieve with X (would you believe) – it’s just the catastrophic failure on Win Phone makes it a hard to recommend as a mobile friendly platform in 2016.

You may wish to start your own thread for support on this – who knows, you may get further than I did and it can’t do any harm to join the ranks of previous customers who have flagged this issue.

I wish you all the best with it. M

Note: Given the advanced stage of your development I would stick to scrolling backgrounds and not use layerslider (using win phone compatibility as excuse) to get the site launched in an acceptable form whilst researching and rebuilding in the background on alternative mobile friendly platform.

Well I’ve tried applying a media query to force backgrounds to scroll below a viewport width:

@media only screen and (max-width: 768px) {
.avia-bg-style-fixed, avia-bg-style-parallax {
background-attachment: scroll !important;}}

While this behaves as expected on the desktop it seems to be being ignored on IE Mobile / Windows Phone and the bug persists.

It would be really great to get some sort of update from the Enfold team – or indeed any sort of response to this request – even just sharing a clue or two as to possible reasons for the bug that I can work on or pay a Windows Phone dev to try and resolve.

At the end of the day, having trialed everything from X theme to stand alone page builders, I keep coming back to Enfold as it really is the best of the bunch in so many ways.

But my clients are businesses with a B2B audience and Windows Phone has a 25% enterprise market share in the UK and other EU countries so I can’t simply ignore it, quote minuscule global consumer penetration stats, or advise them to get an iPhone.

Any response greatly appreciated. Many Thanks.

OK thanks – I’ll park this for now then and come back to it later when I have a staging site up.

Hi Kriesi,

I do feel your pain and agree all the way as far as windows phone is concerned. I have had customer feedback regarding firefox/opera mobile too but frankly they don’t concern me that much (sorry guys) – their market share is minuscule and users are making a choice with them rather than using the default os browser as is the case with windows phone.

My concern with WP is that it does have a higher percentage of users in business environments than the small overall market share suggests and that the failure is complete – i.e. the site is unusable for them. Some kind of fallback for these users would be best case scenario for me – I’m not that worried about parallax / fixed backgrounds working on windows mobile devices, I would just like them disabled or defaulting to a scrolling background so that the site remains accessible.

> I am in the process of getting my hands on a windows phone for a few days and will check if I can a) reproduce the issue and b) fix it.

Should be an interesting experience ;) Browserstack (https://www.browserstack.com/) lets you fire up a real instance of WP for testing and I can confirm that the issues described by me and others show on it.

Good luck and thanks for the response.

Hi Guys – any progress / update on this?

Thanks.

Guys – I totally get this. Windows Phone is a very small market overall share – I think it dipped under 3% last year actually – but I for one assumed it was properly supported until I got a call from a client (and there’s always one).

Anyhoo – the main issue (and the only one I can see) seems to do with the rendering of color section background images when parallax or fixed settings are applied. I’ll bet this is a really simple fix with the reference materials, knowledge and resources you guys have available to you.

As for “we don’t have a Windows Phone” … I’ve seen responses to this issue from months ago saying the same thing and my reckoning goes something like this:

Enfold sales less Envato’s cut = arout $2.5m in earnings to date. Less the cost of running your excellent support service and background development team = still enough to cover the cost of a couple of Nokias and a day of dev time to address a few quirks in ie mobile for those of us with business clients in the audience who use it. And if it doesn’t you could always join the rest of us Browserstack subscribers.

But I could be wrong … ;)

OK, thanks.