Discussion: Lemmy Apps galore! Share your thoughts on them and what comes next!
Hi, !android@lemdro.id community! It's been exciting seeing the Lemmy apps ecosystem continue to evolve, with all sorts of options emerging. Whether you're a seasoned resident of the Fediverse or a newcomer, we'd love to hear about your experiences and expectations for the future.
Which Lemmy apps have you tried?
Do you have any favourites? If so, what sets them apart from the others?
Are there upcoming apps you're looking forward to releasing?
What other functionality would you like to see from a Lemmy app?
I have tried Jerboa, Connect for Lemmy, and Liftoff. Connect for Lemmy is my preferred option now as the UI is cleaner, available at Playstore, enough customisation for me.
Boost for Lemmy is what I am looking out for at the moment.
I'm currently using wefwef because it's the most polished one regarding UI, that I've found. The jerboa one didn't let me sign in via feddit.de because of version mismatch.
But I'm very certain that I'll switch to Sync for Lemmy once that's out, as was a very long-time user of Sync for Reddit and it's UI just was so clean.
After spending some time with each one, I've settled on Liftoff. It has the cleanest, nicest and most configurable UI (IMO), and most things just work. The developer is also actively fixing bugs and making improvements. It's not perfect, but none of them are yet.
I've come from Boost, which pretty much was perfect, and Liftoff seems the closest to it. It will be interesting to see what the Lemmy version of Boost is like.
Well, I've tried all of them that I've run across.
Aside from jerboa, liftoff, connect, and thunder are the furthest along. They're all great in their own way.
Summit, slide, and lemmedit, or whatever the abandoned one on the play store is, are all quasi functional. Summit can't log in that I could find.
Slide is working overall, and the double columns in portrait orientation is awesome to have back. The tabbed interface only lets you switch between all/local/subscribed rather than through your subscribed C/s, but it should get there eventually.
Jerboa is pretty much the most functional overall. Anything you can do via web, you can do in app. And, you can usually do it from your feed rather than having to tap through. Subscribing is the exception there.
All of them can be a bit pissy with links sporadically. You may or may not get taken where you think you will, no matter how the link is formatted.
I think it's connect that does the "everything" feed, which is cool as hell. Great feature that nothing else has as of yet. But, connect isn't open source currently. Which, on a system like lemmy, that's going to be a hard sell long term, though I believe the dev said they were going to open eventually.
The first app to figure out multi subscription function is going to end up the default though. Everybody wants to organize their communities into sorted feeds like multireddits.
I'm eager to see what sync and boost bring to the table, since they're waiting to release until they're beyond alpha, from what I've heard. Two extremely experienced devs with a long history of excellent UI, aesthetics, and functionality. There's no telling what they'll be able to add on top of the lemmy API basics.
Overall, I end up using jerboa the most because I use the all feed for discovery a lot, and it's easier to subscribe and block from jerboa with minimum tap throughs. The feed also works well with the header above links/images, and good division between posts
But I like liftoff the most overall. It flows the best for me until slide and its multiple column display is backed up with more of the basic features as well. I mostly accessed reddit from tablets, and it's the same with lemmy. Being able to make use of the screen real estate better is a killer feature for me.
On Jerboa. Probably need to give connect a shot at some point just to experience it. But I'll almost certainly switch to Boost once it drops. Absolutely hooked on that for reddit for many years and it's such an awesome client I'm sure it's dev, Ruben Mayayo, will do no less for Lemmy.
I've tried jerboa, thunder, wefwef, connect and liftoff. I was having some problems, but they may have been more related to the instance I was on.
In the last couple days, I've been mostly gravitating to wefwef and liftoff. I'd say wefwef is my favorite, but how it handles the back gesture on android is annoying.
I've been using https://wefwef.app (you can install it to your homescreen like a regular app) and really like it. The UI is very iOS-like, but it works perfectly fine on Android. Apparently an Android theme for it is on the roadmap. Before this I was using Jerboa, but ran into issues with sorting/filtering. I think those issues are fixed now, but I'm happy with wefwef and don't see any reason to go back.
Sticking with Liftoff for now as I like the UI more than WefWef while Thunder back gestures not working is a real deal breaker. Have found pros/cons of all of them and none has seemed perfect for me quite yet.
Waiting for Sync, as that was my Reddit app of choice.
I've tried Jerboa, and WefWef in particular. I like both – Jerboa is a native client built using Jetpack Compose, and WefWef is built using Ionic and can be used on any device as a Progressive Web App.
Do you have any favourites? If so, what sets them apart from the others?
WefWef is definitely the best one I've tried. The interface is really nice, but it's probably only a stop gap for me until I finish working on the Material You client I'm working on (which will again be a PWA so that it's easy for everyone to use on all their devices).
As for what sets WefWef apart is that it's the only feature complete Lemmy client with a somewhat half decent UX (Apple's HIG is actually pretty bad compared to Material).
Are there any upcoming apps you're looking forward to releasing?
Yes, an initial launch of a working version of the Material You client I'm working on. Also Sync, Boost, and the rest of the old Reddit clients.
What other functionality would you like to see from a Lemmy app?
Honestly, the one thing I'm absolutely missing is good UX patterns and proper mod tools. Since there is no AutoModerator equivalent on Lemmy, most posts go live and could break rules of a community. Currently, none of the apps have good mod tools, and having good tools for moderation on the go is absolutely essential in growing a healthy community.
I'm making a web app at the moment for personal use. So far, you can scroll posts, sort, filter, upvote, downvote, view one comment page, view a user's posts, view a community's posts, subscribe / block users and communities... and that's about it
Ironically, since it doesn't have the blur NSFW post feature yet, it's a much better client for browsing NSFW communities than established clients :D
Absolutely not ready for prime time yet; there's no deployment, you have to build it from source and it you can't even comment. https://github.com/NatoBoram/Leanish
Jerboa's improved a lot lately, but I've also been using Connect when it has problems. When the Lemmy versions of popular Reddit apps come out, I might switch to one of them since I expect them to be more refined out of the gate.
The thing I think I want the most is a clone of RIF's comment navigation. Being able to easily skip through long threads is a feature I didn't realize I'd miss, but I used it all the time on there. Jerboa kind of has it now, but it doesn't let you move up through child comments and the "active" comment is always at the top of the screen.
I have Liftoff, Jerboa, Connect, and Summit installed. That is my current preferred order but they are all making like multiple updates daily so I'm keeping tabs on them all. I'm also looking forward to Boost.
My favourites are Connect and Liftoff. And in the last couple of days Jerboa had a good catch-up run.
I mean they ALL evolved a good deal in the last 2 weeks, it's just amazing. Thank you, devs!
Upcoming? Yes. Sync. I've used it for Reddit for like 6 years. I miss it very, very deeply.
I really hope some of these are working on ensuring compatibility with both lemmy and kbin platforms. I expected they'd just work, because ActivityPub, as I assumed the backends where more alike than similar, but since kbin.social accounts don't seem to be able to login, I suspect there will be more work necessary than this end user thought.
Does anyone know of apps with proper spoiler parsing like the Lemmy websites have? It's made looking at threads for games/shows pretty annoying, and I don't really want to go with the PWA route because I frequently search questions on my phone and don't want my Lemmy history crowding up my browser history
Edit: I've tried jerboa, connect, and liftoff so far, and none of them seem to have it. I also realized my comment is unclear, I specifically mean comment spoiler tags with :::
Jerboa. When my previous preferred discussion forum decided to erect a paywall, closing out third-party apps, I came here; and searching for Lemmy on f-droid got me Jerboa. For a while, the app was spontaneously exiting, but before I was driven to try another, it seemed to have gotten fixed.
I've got Connect and Liftoff installed and I can't figure out how to view all my subscriptions in a feed in Connect. Am I just tired or is this a pending feature? Thanks in advance!
As someone who tried a lot of Reddit apps before settling on Boost's list view, Jerboa and Thunder have ended up at the top of my list. Jerboa does pretty much everything I want it to, and now that I'm on a smaller instance everything has been pretty stable for me.
Thunder is SO clean though, with UI that's just wonderful to look at. The dev has been SO friendly and super responsive, and every alpha release has only improved on the features I'm looking for. If you like a good compact view and you're okay with swipe voting (at least until voting arrows are added, which I believe is on the longer-term roadmap), Thunder is on track to be top of the pack. This was after trying but not vibing as much with Liftoff, Connect, Summit, etc.
Also, other interested developers - Thunder is open source, so if it looks good to you and you think you could help make it even better, go check out the Github!
All that said, I am SO excited that Boost is going to be a Lemmy client. I have a feeling Boost and Thunder will both end up on my phone in the end. :) Excited to see so many stellar apps to choose from this early in my Lemmy journey!
I've tried all the apps in the play store but haven't found one that lets me doomscroll horizontally by swiping right. Anyone know if I'm just a idiot or do none of them have that functionality?