I mean, I probably literally "can" read text files inside a .zip file on my iPhone. It's not that it's impossible for it to do that. But I don't think I currently have an app that knows how to do it. iOS Files.ipa doesn't do that.

As such, starting from zero, to "explore" the code in a .zip file on my phone, I'd have to:

1. download the .zip file in my browser;

2. go into the App Store, seek out some alternative file browser app that supports archive extraction/browsing and text-file viewing and isn't some dumb scam, and install it;

3. go back to the browser and/or the Files app, and "share" the downloaded archive file from there into this separate filer app I've downloaded (because such apps — other than Apple's specially-deigned one — can only see things handed into their specific sandbox.)

4. open the filer app;

5. open the archive inside the app (which would either extract it or traverse into it — really a roll of the dice†);

6. open the file within the archive, and read it;

7. remember to delete the archive, and potentially the extracted worktree from the archive, when I'm done.

All this vs., clicking a link to the repo page; clicking a link on the repo page to one of the files in the repo; and reading. All just within the browser the phone already comes with. Maybe (in theory, if I didn't have a newer phone) chugging a bit as I scroll — but I'm reading the code, not searching it; I only need the page to refresh as quickly as I can take in the whole previous page.

† And IIRC (from playing around with such filer apps with Android smart TVs), such filer apps are mostly going to only offer the ability to expand archives, rather than to traverse them. This is fine for tiny archives; but it's a very bad idea if you've got the sort of "several snapshots of internal builds/releases of the SDK scraped off of people's HDs" archive that you usually see in the corporate-software anthropology space. These snapshots usually each contain, among other things, binary tools and binary assets; and due to there being multiple snapshots in the archive, you've got a large number of redundant (often byte-identical!) copies of them (that due to the compression distance, haven't been compressed together.) Such archives therefore often add up to several GBs of data, and millions of files. You don't want to expand that onto your phone's teeny little 256GB disk just to poke around in one or two files!

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...of course, that being said, when I'm on my laptop and on my home wi-fi, I don't read any more than trivial code on Github; that'd be silly.

Instead, if I want to poke around the files of a repo, I just pop open a shell, clone the repo, and open the resulting worktree in an IDE.

In theory, the best mobile workflow would do the same (but in a way that's more careful with mobile data. So maybe with a shallow git clone — or even a theoretical "thin client" clone that uses a FUSE-like layer in the app to fetch git objects one-at-a-time, just-in-time, as the IDE attempts to read them.)

But note that the backend for that "best mobile workflow" would still be something that looks like https+git or git+ssh — not something that looks like an application/x-zip response from a webserver. So, in this ideal world, you'd still want the code to live in a hosted git repo somewhere!