I have a login where the name is something like cc - something.
In my browser extension, if I enter cc something or even cc some it will show this item.
But on the iOS app, as soon as I type cc s, it shows no results.
If I search for cc or something it shows the results, but it also shows a slew of other things that aren’t what I am looking for.
I would expect the search results between browser extension and iOS app to match.
Since this is an obvious bug, I have submitited a bug in GitHub: Search on iOS app does not return results like the browser extension does · Issue #2644 · bitwarden/mobile · GitHub.
This is not the case. The browser extension (as well as the Desktop app and Web Vault) uses Full-Text Search, but the mobile apps only have Basic Search available. Therefore, results can be different.
That is the silliest decision I’ve heard. Everyone knows that you want a consistent experience across mediums/platforms. I mean take a que from Apple and how they are making changes to macOS and iOS to have a more common and consistent experience.
It makes no sense that mobile search and web/browser/extension search is different. That’s just bad design.
I submitted a feature request to change this.
In case anyone comes across this thread and wants to upvote my feature request.
It is most likely a technical limitation that is preventing Full-Text Search from working in the mobile apps. To make the search experience consistent across all devices, Bitwarden would probably have to downgrade the non-mobile search functionality so that it is restricted to Basic Search only.
I would be very curious if that is the case. As a developer I’d be curious what about iOS would prevent BW from doing a full search.
Feel free to have a look at (or contribute to) the codebase on GitHub. It’s likely a limitation of the library that is used for searching. The non-mobile apps use the Lunr.js library, but the mobile apps are mostly implemented in C#.
I have looked through the code. I don’t have cycles to learn a new language or improve code. I already tried (and failed) to fix the broken search.
Super interesting. I’m sure it’s not exactly a technical limit and more a “didn’t want to develop similar functionality in the mobile version”.
Either way, I submitted an FR so I’ll keep an eye out for it. Whenever they get either of my two concerns fixed, I’ll come back to BW.
I would say it’s more like “we’re not going to waste our time reinventing the wheel by rolling our own custom search engine, so we’ll just import suitable search utilities from libraries that are available for the mobile and non-mobile platforms, respectively.”
You’re right. That is fair. I didn’t think of it like that.
I do hope they do see the value in having a consistant search experience across platforms and fix it. Will keep my eyes open.