Windows Phone Support – Update

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.

Hi Kriesi – Info in private content.

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.

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.

Hey Kriesi,

Thanks for your comments – really do completely understand your position on this. Windows Phone is pain – to use and to debug. I too asked around and found none with colleagues or friends – the only people that seem to have them are clients (who have had them forced upon them I suspect).

The only point I would make is that the difference between IE on Win Phone and a third party browser like FF for Android is that it is the default browser on a mobile OS rather than a choice the user has made. I would certainly not expect third party browser support on mobile from a framework as feature rich and friendly as yours but I, and it seems others, had made the assumption that the default Win Phone browser would be covered.

I am happy that you are prepared to take a look at Win Phone issues on a case by case basis – this is reassuring and is very much appreciated.

Thanks too to Ismael for his input and solution! The parallax background fix works and just awaiting similar for fixed backgrounds (these are the only client reports of issues I have had). I have not seen this, or any other problems, with elements like the full width slider and although another user has mentioned Layerslider may have issues it tests ok in my implementations, so my confidence is restored.

PS I would say that I hope you enjoy your new Windows Phone but, from my own limited experience with it, I’m pretty sure you won’t ;)

Nailed it! Created mixed page of multiple fixed and parallax backgrounds on original demo (url private below) and all revert to scroll on Browserstack WinPhone emulations! Have not tested across Android / iOS yet but hopes are high.

Big thanks mate!

PS how are you debugging on Win Phone – are their any handy browser tools?

Tests OK on:

5s iOS 8
6 iOS 8
6s iOS9

iPad4 iOS 7
iPad Air2 iOS8

Nexus 5 – 4.4
Nexus 6 – 5
Nexus 6 – 6
Galaxy s6- 6

Safari 9 – El Capitain

IE11 & Edge – Win10
IE10 – Win8

That’ll do me :)