time format on mobile devices

[tovabele]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Body

apparently all activities have their timestamp rendered in human readable format. this is circumventable by hovering a mouse cursor on the time stamp, but when checking activity on mobile or touch screen devices it is not possible to get precise commit times.

i personally find this problematic in teams with critical timing as i don’t always have access to a mouse cursor.

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[syedsafeer]

Hi @tovabele, this is a classic UI/UX gap for touch devices. Since mobile browsers don't support the 'hover' state, the absolute timestamp (hidden in the HTML title attribute) is nearly impossible to trigger naturally.
A temporary workaround is to long-press the relative timestamp on some mobile browsers, this will force the tooltip to appear. However, a real fix would be for GitHub to implement a 'tap-to-toggle' feature for times on mobile. This is excellent product feedback for the mobile engineering team.

(If this helps, please Mark as Answer.)

[naqvi110k]

Thank you for posting this. I've been quietly annoyed by this for way too long. The relative timestamps ("2 hours ago", "yesterday") are fine for a quick glance, but when I'm actually debugging a deployment failure or trying to figure out if someone pushed before or after a critical incident, I need the exact UTC time.

The hover-to-reveal pattern is just broken on touch devices. Long-press sometimes works, but half the time it triggers the browser's context menu instead of the tooltip. On Safari iOS, I've found that tapping and holding exactly on the timestamp text (not the surrounding area) works maybe 30% of the time. Not reliable.

What I've resorted to:

• Switching to desktop view in mobile browser (painful, zooming required)
• Copying the timestamp text and pasting it somewhere else? Doesn't work – the absolute time isn't even in the DOM until you hover.
• Just giving up and using git log on my laptop

A real fix would be so simple: Add a title attribute tap-to-reveal on mobile, or just show the absolute time in a smaller font next to the relative time. Every other platform (GitLab, Bitbucket, even Jira) handles this better.

I've upvoted your feedback. Hopefully someone on the mobile team notices this. It's a small thing, but when you're on-call and only have your phone, it's a real blocker.