I was recently developing apps used in educational settings with Thunkable Drag and Drop, and noticed some issues with the User Interface (UI) being out of place on Live Previews.
However, I have noticed that while running Live Preview on iOS, many UI elements such as buttons, groups and images tends to be compressed vertically. The other major issue with this is that the switch element is completely misplaced.
Thanks for this great question. This topic has come up a lot over the years.
It’s my view that the companion app is best suited for testing your apps functionality on a mobile device allowing you to use the Sensors, BLE, GPS, camera, etc.
The live preview on web is better suited for seeing how your app will appear when it’s finally published and installed on a device.
We continue to work towards making the companion app appear more like the live version. In fact, this was a topic of discussion in the last month. So, we acknowledge the parities and are always working on improving the experience as much as we can!
Are the differences prohibiting you from being able to publish your app?
For my use case, I am deploying it in an educational context for grade school students to learn app development and to pair it with IoT devices. As such, the students would not typically be publishing those apps, but will mostly use it with Live Preview.
I managed to hack together a solution for the switch misplacement issue that might work for those using Live Preview, which is to place the switch within a Group and continuously adjust the borders of the Group while previewing it on your phone, so that the switch is more or less in the same position for both Live Preview and Web Preview. This might not work in other designs requiring a more responsive app, but does work in a pinch…
