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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?
115 comments

  • 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.

  • I was a Relay user for years and found that I prefer Connect followed closely by Jerboa.

    I've also tried Thunder and Liftoff which are both great but the UI/UX of Connect and Jerboa seem to feel more at home for me.

    I make an effort to use all four interchangeably but my thumb gravitates to Connect more often than not.

  • So far I've only tried Connect and Liftoff, with Connect being the better of the two.

    However, being a serious Sync user for Reddit, once that app is ready for Lemmy, I'm sure there won't be any other alternative.

  • Which Lemmy apps have you tried?

    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

    • Nice, I look forward to seeing how it comes along! Let me know when it's more functional and I can also add it to our sticky post.

    • From the screenshot it looks like you can type in the page number? That's pretty neat

      • It's honestly something I have always wanted from Reddit. You know that moment when you open a post, do stuff, go back and then suddenly you lost your scroll position and you have to go back to where you were and it takes so much time that you just close the app? Yeah, fuck that.

        I'm thinking about infinite scrolling in a way that edits the page number automatically so that you can go back even if you reload the page, but it's definitely not a priority at the moment. I'd rather add basic features like commenting and posting first. And maybe basic mod tools, since it's always something that third-party apps lack for some reason.

  • 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.

  • Jerboa, Summit, Connect, Liftoff, Lemmotif, Thunder, Wefwef

    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.

  • Voyager/wefwef is the best one rn honestly, even if the design language is iOS

    Waiting for Sync and Boost 🙏🙏

  • I was originally using Jerboa, but scrolling was really laggy for some reason so I ended up switching to Liftoff and it's been much better.

    • Yep, Liftoff is pretty smooth and has decent customization options.

  • 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.

  • 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!

    • Thunder has very high potential, its UI is vastly superior to Liftoff, currently my biggest issue is with its loading speed, it's unbelievably slow. Liftoff on the other hand has terrible UI, but amazing functionality while being extremely fast and open-source too.

      • Switching to a smaller instance mitigated a lot of slowdown for me, but the dev is working on further loading improvements! Maybe check back in a week or two?

115 comments