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Implementing responsive data visualizations in R for mobile compatibility

👀 Views: 23 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-09-13
r ggplot2 shiny plotly mobile-responsiveness R

I'm wondering if anyone has experience with I'm deploying to production and I've encountered a strange issue with I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple... Building an application that delivers real-time data analytics, I'm focusing on ensuring our visualizations render well on mobile devices... Currently, we’re leveraging the `ggplot2` package to create interactive plots but have run into challenges making them responsive. I experimented with `ggplotly()` from the `plotly` library, thinking it might provide the interactivity we need. Here’s a snippet of what I tried: ```r library(ggplot2) library(plotly) # Base ggplot p <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg)) + geom_point(aes(color = factor(cyl))) # Converting to plotly p_plotly <- ggplotly(p) # Trying to make the layout mobile-friendly p_plotly <- p_plotly %>% layout(height = 400) ``` Even after setting the height parameter, the plot still doesn’t adapt well to smaller screens. I've also tried wrapping the plot in a `div` with CSS styles for `max-width`, but the results weren’t promising. In my quest for a more responsive design, I came across the `shiny` package, which offers more flexibility. I set up a basic Shiny app like this: ```r library(shiny) ui <- fluidPage( titlePanel("Mobile-Friendly Plot"), sidebarLayout( sidebarPanel(), mainPanel(plotlyOutput("myPlot")) ) ) server <- function(input, output) { output$myPlot <- renderPlotly({ ggplotly(p) }) } shinyApp(ui, server) ``` While this approach improved the layout, the interaction still isn’t as smooth as I’d like on mobile devices. Has anyone successfully implemented responsive ggplot visualizations in a Shiny app or any other recommendations for achieving a seamless mobile experience? Any help or insights would be greatly appreciated! For context: I'm using R on Ubuntu. How would you solve this? Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm developing on Windows 10 with R. Am I missing something obvious? What's the best practice here? Am I missing something obvious?