Avelon App

Hi everyone!

This update adds push notifications, a bunch of fixes and a few requested improvements. It also turned out that the second RC for Lemmy v19 broke a lot of things in the API, so those issues are fixed in this update too.

Here's the changelog:

Avelon 1.0.8

• Added push notifications
• Added support for Lemmy version 19
• Added option to always show post authors
• Removed karma/upvote counts for user profiles
• Fixed issue with page animations not showing properly on iOS 17.1+ and some other 17.1 issues
• Fixed API issue with some accounts that could greatly reduce performance
• Fixed a rare hang in the subscriptions page
• Fixed crash when tapping enter after writing an emoji
• Fixed a crash caused by certain corrupted images
• Fixed UI layout issues in some rare scenarios
• Fixed performance issues with some posts
• Fixed a rare crash triggered by some feed types
• Various other bugfixes and improvements

Apologies for the slow communication lately, I've been in a busy period and haven't had as much time to put into Lemmy as usual.

Hope you enjoy the update!

I do hope @evgiz@lemm.ee is alright.

How’s this app nowadays? Still usable and in development?

Community seems not really alive unfortunately, saw the last post was from 2 months ago.

I still can’t log in for whatever reason It was my favorite Lemmy client until I suddenly could not log into my account anymore. I even was paying for a subscription.

The log in process is horrible. If you leave the app with any log in information in the fields, it removes them when returning.

Not to mention I can’t even sign in. Ridiculous.

Looking at the app on the App Store, it seems it hasn’t had any updates in over 4 months so I’m assuming it’s dead?

I accidentally blocked a community when viewing a post. Is there a way to undo this in the app or a way online?

So when I try gif scrubbing, it says I need to upgrade to Pro. Okay, but in settings there are only options for donating to the developer now, and there is no Pro upgrade anymore. So what’s going on here? Is the Pro option going away? If I donate, will I get Pro features? Does the interface just need to catch up with new monetization model? I’m confused.

Looks like every post from Reddit images and redgif are broken and don’t load any more

Im using on iphone 12 running on 17.3.1(latest version) and the apps version also latest on 1.0.8.

Having a feature to edit posts or comments after they are published within the app itself would be great for correcting mistakes or adding additional information.

I’m using the iPad app in my Vision Pro and I can log in, but all the feeds just error out

I switched over to the app last night and noticed that my subscription list is empty. The Home screen shows my subscription posts correctly but the actual list of them is never populated even after force closing the app and reopening.

In October, a new sorting mode was introduced: „scaled“

This allows sorting posts based on the size of the community in order to avoid the feed being dominated by large, active communities, and pushing smaller communities. This was one of the main blockers for me to move from Reddit, so I’m glad it’s finally implemented. Therefore, I would love to see this sort option be available in Avelon on supported instances.

Thanks!

This happens both on a feed as well as within a thread.

Happens both on my direct instance as well as on a random instance out there.

I go to scroll, and there is a nearly one-second pause before the screen jumps to where I have scrolled. If I start very slowly, there is no pause, but I am talking about an unreasonably slow start to the scroll.

Working with an iPhone 15 Pro Max, hardware limitations should not be in play here.

Working with the latest version of Avalon.

Curious if I am the only one.

I just started using this app today after wading through bug after bug with Voyager. Like many, Apollo was my go-to app for years and years, so it’s natural to gravitate to the one that looks exactly like it.

However, I consume this type of content mostly on my iPad, and often I’m using Stage Manager with an external KB and trackpad. Voyager in this mode barely works, so I’m just making a post here to say thanks for making this app feel great in this mode. 😎

The apps seems to crash every 30 minutes of scrolling. The whole phone is then laggy for a few minutes. It looks like there is a memory leak.

When I bring up an image by itself, I can do a long press on the image and get the app Safari drop-down interface (see attached), which gives me (along with other tools) the option to download the image to my camera roll or to copy the image for pasting elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the Avelon app blocks this action entirely.

If there is a workaround, it gives no indication as to what it is, forcing the user to thrash around and discover the box with the out/up arrow in the lower right.

If there is a way to whitelist this behaviour, there is also no way to inform the user on what setting they need to adjust.

At any rate, this is a noticeably frustrating suboptimal UI/UX, and should be addressed.

Hey there,

I would absolutely love if we could have settings apply and save on a per-account basis. I’m trying to be a responsible degenerate and keep my lewdness sectioned away in a separate account, but so often I’ll forget to change things back and I’ll have to hurriedly hide my phone when browsing my sfw account in public so that I don’t expose the neighborhood children to that weird-ass kink they just aren’t ready for yet.

This is one of the very few features I personally think is missing to make this a full 10/10 app, even though it’s still far and away my favorite as-is.

>

As a side note, I’m a frontend dev myself and would happily contribute to this project if I knew where to start. I’ve poked around in the source code a little but got lost in the structure and in the local setup instructions. If anyone can either point me to the relevant TS/JS/config (or similar) files, or help me understand the app layout and local build process, I’d be very much obliged and eager to contribute when I have downtime.

Have you given up on this project?

I think Avelon has become one of the best Lemmy apps for iOS, but there is one issue that is preventing me from buying into Pro and making it my default: inline video only for video and gifs.

This is such a huge drawback to otherwise great app; the native player has simple, intuitive and familiar controls; allowing users to switch to horizontal, mute, pause, rewind/forward, etc.

Is support for the native player disabled intentionally or is this something that is in the works?

Came across an issue with this post: https://lemmy.ml/post/9922111

When viewed in browser it’s a scene from Star Trek about beards, when viewed in Avelon though it’s a video of chinchilla’s dancing and waving their butts about.

Happens each time the post loads, in both the main feed and the post view itself.

With most instances updated to 19.0 and Avelon supporting it, when will we be able to use the new Scaled and Controversial sorting methods?

I’ve been through every setting page, triple checked I’m on the latest version, force closed the app, and restarted my phone but it seems like this has disappeared?

Anyone else?

Hey all, I’ve been unable to log into the app with this lemmynsfw.com account for the past week or so. Every time I try, I get the following message:

!

I had issues with downvotes always erroring for about a week before that - not sure if it’s related. My other account works normally.

Anybody else having similar issues?

It’s been a months since 1.0.7 and the app still has bugs that need to be fixed. I’m hesitant to pay for the next month of pro without any progress. Meanwhile Voyager gets multiple updates per week…

When trying to add a new guest instance it opens the window to type it and it quickly disappears.

On a side note, what’s going on with the development? It’s the longest we’ve had without a new update and (at least for me) Avelon has become a little laggy, not to mention 0.19 is just a few days away.

Hope everything is okay with evgiz.

Instance upgraded to Lemmy .19 Beta and now login through Avelon is broken.

Title, don’t have much to add. Tried with 😎 and 🐓.

when watching an embedded video in avelon, its streaming smoothly while buffering, but the spinning loading icon is in the middle of the screen, blocking the view.

the yellow progress bar is already indicating the buffering, so couldnt we just remove the loading icon so we can see the content?

Every time I open the app I have to re-enter my login information. This only started recently. Am I missing an option to stay logged in?

Now and then when I open the app, it just crashes and closes. I tap the icon again and it opens fine. Anyone else having this issue?

As the title says, the shade of gray used for Pure Black theme makes most of the text using that shade borderline unreadable.

This problem is not present when using any other dark theme other than Pure Black.

Please could this be changed so that the text is as readable as with other themes?

I struggle to click on anything that has a height of 1 line of texts. Short comments, post titles… other stuff

It’s actually pretty aggravating.

Idk what the solution is for this, but it’s a problem I virtually never had w Apollo. Is the touch target only the line of text and not inclusive of the padding around the text?

Ios 17.0.3 Avalon 1.0.8

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/7163222

Hi everyone,

For the past weeks I've been working hard on a push notification service for Avelon that is finally ready for open beta! This feature involves a completely new cloud service that automatically notifies you whenever someone replies to your posts/comments, and it simultaneously supports multiple accounts you might have. Although the app itself doesn't change much with this new Testflight build, there's a lot of stuff happening in the background to make push notifications happen.

My goal with the open beta is to test the service with many more users to see how it scales under heavier load. I'm not sure how powerful of a server it'll need - and as many of you might know cloud compute isn't exactly cheap. The service isn't quite done yet, so while I keep working on it you should expect downtime and occasionally delayed notifications.

How to join

• Download the latest 1.0.8 testflight build
• Open Avelon and go to Settings/Notifications
• Enable notifications for the accounts you wanna use

When you're testing, I'm especially interested in verifying that you're not getting any duplicate notifications and that you're receiving notifications for all the accounts you've enabled. Also, please share any bugs you might find or thoughts about how to improve things!

Notifications should still work if you go back to the App Store version without deleting the app, but notifications won't open the post and the notification badge will probably not behave properly. This is just a result of the previous version not supporting notifications yet, and will ofc be resolved with the official release!

Technical stuff for those interested

The push notification service is written in Rust, which is a pretty awesome language. This is my first time using it for a complete solution, but I must say I'm already sold on the features the language offers. Ensuring performance and security was a breeze compared to many other languages I've used. For those unaware, Lemmy itself is also written in Rust.

I've prioritized making sure the service scales well with many users, whilst not being heavier than necessary on the Lemmy servers. All traffic from the Avelon service is properly tagged to make it easy for instance owners to verify that the traffic is legit, and not some kind of DOS attack. If the traffic turns out to be a bit heavy for any instance owners, please don't hesitate to contact me to discuss how I can tweak the service to be less demanding on your server.

With the addition of push notifications I'll also update the privacy badge on the App Store to include (opt-in) collection of device identifiers. This is just a practical necessity to know which device to send notifications to. Apple continuously shuffles these random IDs, and they are the only ones who know who each one belongs to. The Avelon service simply sends a notification with the ID to Apple, and they figure out which device to forward it to. And of course, if you disable push notifications in the app all your info is immediately deleted from the notification server.

Thanks for reading & helping me test!

I’m either blind or this isn’t a feature of this app yet, but there doesn’t seem to be a feature yet to add an account to a block list.

I’m just so tired of seeing b0t@zerobytes.monster posts.

I believe I’ve seen that Lemmy has a bot account flag for repost bots like b0t, it would great if you could filter all accounts flagged as bots too.

If Face ID unlock fails multiple times, the app offers an option to “Enter Password”, which leads to another set of Face ID attempts. If for whatever reason you can’t (or it’s inconvenient to) use Face ID, you’re essentially stuck.

Most apps, including the OS itself, offer an option to enter the device passcode after a few Face ID failures, and some even offer it right after the first failure alongside the retry option.

The only places I’ve seen the “Enter Password” option are banking apps which have their own underlying PINs, so they fall back to that instead of the device passcode. Since Avelon doesn’t have its own password or PIN, this expectedly leads to a loop of Face ID attempts.

Avelon version: 1.0.7.3

iOS version: 1.7.3

Device: iPhone 13 Pro

It would be practical, if taking posts button would being you to the top if you already scrolled some. If you’re on top, then it could open side menu as till now. This would be easier for refreshing the feed.

Missed a dm that wasn't displayed in the inbox. Stable

Thank you for Avelon!

Requesting an option to show the submitting user (submitter) in the Feed views, especially the Compact Post view.

I got used to this feature back in the Apollo days. Seeing the submitter gives more info on whether to open/view a post (i.e. is the poster a known bot? known troll? known spammer? have they posted previous un- or likeable content?)

Thank you for your consideration!