I again commend the developer for being the only developer so far on the App Store to port R to iOS. The app runs fast and smoothly and produces great plots. Compared to my review 1 year ago:
Improvements:
- GUI has been redone and is much easier to read on the iPad; larger and customizable font. Buttons are easy to read and easy to understand what they do. Plotting canvas is movable and resizable.
- R has been updated to more modern 4.2.1 version
- R scripts can now be stored anywhere on the iPad as R Analyst accesses the iOS Files app
Disappointments:
- Unlike the prior version of R Analyst, the new R Analyst version is set up to be an R IDE: users either enter their own R script in the editor or load an R script stored somewhere on their iPad. After entering or loading the R script, users hit a "Run" button which shows the output of their R script. That is great, but I (and suspect a lot of others users) also rely on the R command line (REPL) to do quick analyses or manipulate files in R. R Analyst no longer comes with a REPL to allow users to enter and quickly run R commands. Hopefully the developer will consider bringing back (or adding on) a REPL to R Analyst.
- **There does not appear to be anyway to store or read external data files from R Analyst (e.g. .RData, .txt, or .csv files, etc). This is a major shortcoming of R Analyst as users will expect to use R to process external data. Perhaps I'm missing something in understanding how to use the app, but there doesn't appear to be any "import" button for data (only for R script) and there doesn't appear to be a way programmatically to load data into R's filesystem in the R Analyst app (i.e. can't seem to find how to programmatically change the working directory [setwd()] in R analyst to the R Analyst "documents" folder where perhaps I could read in stored data files). Hopefully the developer will promptly remedy this critical limitation of the app or explain how users are supposed to import external data into R analyst
- No documentation instructions for R Analyst. Learning R can be alone challenging for beginning R users; not having any documentation on how to use R Analyst to successfully harness R's power will likely unfortunately dissuade many novice R users from using what would otherwise be a very useful app for running R offline on an iOS mobile device. Hopefully, the developer will also build in basic documentation for R Analyst in the future.
Feature Request:
I would encourage the developer to enable the ability for R Analyst to install R packages from the CRAN repository. Previously, Apple seemed to impose stricter limitations on App Store apps' ability to import code to user's devices; however, CRAN is an established repository and at least one other approved App Store app (iSH) is allowed to import code into its app from a repository (Alpine Linux repository). Apple may therefore accept the developer enabling importing of packages from the CRAN repository which would then open up the usefulness of R Analyst's R iOS port even more.
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To summarize, the newest update to R Analyst (10/2022 version) looks great with its new updated GUI and continues to run R at amazing speeds natively and securely offline on iOS mobile devices. The app has great potential, but in its current state of development is significantly hampered by primarily by its inability to import or export external data and its loss of REPL command line functionality. Hopefully, the developer will continue to improve the app to fix these limitations. There has been a huge interest online from the R community to have R ported to iOS to be able to use natively on mobile devices, and the developer is to be commended for doing so. If the developer would like assistance in improving his port of R to iOS, the developer may wish to consider making some or all of his R port open source and placing it on GitHub which I suspect other developers would be happy to to contribute to.
Thank you.
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The Way It Could Be
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