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Avelon App @lemm.ee
evgiz @lemm.ee

Introducing Avelon for Lemmy - Join the open beta!

Hi everyone! I'm happy to announce that my iOS Lemmy app "Avelon" is finally ready for beta testing! I've been working tirelessly on the app lately and I think it is turning into a quite solid experience now. I'm very excited to hear what you think and gather more feedback before I move towards an App Store release.

My focus for Avelon has been to polish the base functionality as much as possible to ensure that the day-to-day browsing feels as good as possible. I've also done things a bit differently to make it easier for new people to try out the Fediverse. Rather than requiring new users to look through a complicated list of instances the first time, the app automatically shuffles a list of preset instances so you don't need to think about it until later when you register. This will hopefully also reduce the load on individual servers.

Features

Avelon already supports quite a few cool features:

  • Posts and feeds
    • Clean UI to explore all your feeds
    • A pretty nice comment view
    • Support for images, GIFs, videos, youtube
    • See community feeds and sidebars
    • Quick search communities and subscriptions
  • Login to your account
    • Reply to posts/comments (with markdown highlighter!)
    • View and edit your old comments
    • Upvote comments and posts
    • View/manage your followed communities
  • Design & customization
    • Dark and light mode with customizable accent color
    • Compact posts, large posts and gallery view
    • Footer/header bars automatically hide for a cleaner experience
    • Change behavior such as tap to collapse, default sorting etc.
    • Long press actions for a less cluttered interface

..and probably some other things I can't remember just now.

Screenshots

Check these out!

Join the beta

The beta is available on testflight through this link (limited to 1000 testers for now):

Join Avelon Beta on Testflight

The app is supported on all iPhones with iOS 16 and higher (worked ok on my old iPhone X!). I'd love to hear what you think about the overall user experience, design, functionality, stability as well as any bugs or issues you might find. A few important features are still missing, most notably adding new posts. I'd love to hear what additions you are most interested in me looking at first:

  • Creating posts
  • Viewing users comments/posts
  • Saving posts/comments
  • Report/mod tools
  • Multiple accounts
  • Themes/more customization
  • Improved image/video viewer
  • Anything else?

Thank you & future plans

First, I'd like to thank Christian Selig (the developer of the Apollo app) for creating a really amazing app that I've been using every day for the last several years. As you can tell, Avelon is definitely inspired by Apollo (though I think I've put my own personal spin on the design and functionality!).

If people enjoy Avelon I'd like to spend more of my free time working on it and improving the app over time. In the spirit of transparency, I'd like to mention that I might do some kind of "pro" version at some point later on to support the project. All the base functionality people need will of course be free, but pro features could be additional "nice-to-have" features like themes or advanced tools etc. I'm not planning to do anything paid just yet though, just wanted to mention it. Right now my focus is to provide a great experience and to help build the Lemmy platform into something even better.

Finally I'd like to thank the Lemmy developers as well as everyone using the platform. Everyone contributing is making this platform the amazing place it is turning into. I personally haven't browsed the site-that-should-not-be-named since the API shut down - I decided to spend all that time on developing this app instead. And I'm really excited to see what Lemmy becomes over the years.

Sigve Røkenes

/evgiz

26 comments

  • Out of the Lemmy apps I’ve tried, this one seems to me like it has the most potential! You can definitely see the Apollo DNA in Avelon. Memmy and Voyager/wefwef come close as well but something about Avalon just works.

    Posting from within the app should be top priority for the next feature. Followed by an easy way to ‘upvote/downvote’, reply, report, block etc. Maybe swiping but easy access buttons would be a nice start.

    I’d also like to see some kind of ‘hold to preview’ functionality in ‘compact’ view especially for images and videos.

    One other Apollo function that I’d really like to see is gif/video scrubbing.

    • Thanks! It's not super obvious but you can tap the upvote label to vote on posts/comments, for downvotes you have to long press. I'm looking at adding swipe gestures as well.

      Gif/video scrubbing would definitely be cool, but I might have to write a lot of the "video engine" stuff from scratch to support things like that. The video/gif viewer is not perfect atm, definitely something I want to improve on. The Apollo viewer is honestly the best one I've seen in any app ever.

  • Downloaded and did a quick tour. It looks very clean. I look forward to seeing where it goes!

  • Looks good! Any chance to add yellow as an accent color choice?

    It seems quite clean at the moment! I like it!

    • Yeah for sure, yellow would look pretty cool especially in dark mode. I'll include it in the next build!

  • The app looks great, congratulations on your beta release! The app is good looking and responsive.

    I love the Avalon’s YouTube player, and images in comments. My main client is Voyager on iPad and I’ve been missing the video player from Apollo. I could see myself watching a lot more videos if I didn’t have to navigate out of Lemmy.

    The search feature with All / Home / Local picker is nice. The guest instances is a nice touch and will be helpful to onboard new users to Lemmy.

    The main features that I would love to see Avelon are: an iPad mode, swipe to vote / navigate, and mark as read on scroll.

    I look forward to following along on your progress! Well done.

    Edit: Of the features you listed, I think creating posts would be the best to focus on. Lemmy needs more content!

    • Thanks for the detailed feedback! Images inside comments was honestly a bit of a hassle, but glad I got around to support it.

      an iPad mode

      A good ipad app would take a bit more work (cough apollo cough), but I'll look into supporting larger screens with the current UI at least.

      swipe to vote / navigate

      Definitely want this myself, but had some issues when testing it initially. I have a buggy version internally, but wanna get it right before releasing it to more people.

      mark as read on scroll

      Good idea, I'll probably add a toggle for this since some people might not like it.

      Lemmy needs more content!

      Definitely, but I'm pretty impressed with Lemmy lately. Quite a lot of content, but yeah we need people to post instead of just lurking.

      • Thanks for your detailed reply!

        Sad we never got the long awaited Apollo iPad app. Christian released a few screenshots in the last few days if you’re interested. A larger UI would be good. Apollo’s iOS app did work quite well on iPad, as does Voyager.

        Thanks for considering those other features, looking forward to the future!

  • Just joined the TestFlight. I’ve tried out every other Lemmy iOS app since joining, and I really think Avelon has the potential to be one of the best. With a few more features added and a couple of additional tweaks, it may even become the best out of all of them. Really dig the clean interface!

    My biggest requests would be swipe actions (to reply, save, etc), either a button or some way to scroll back to the top of the feed automatically (like hitting the Posts button again), a button to scroll to the next reply in a post (most third party Reddit apps had this but I haven’t seen any Lemmy ones with the capability), and of course a way to post from the app.

    The app is absolutely beautiful, and I’m excited to watch it grow. Thanks for creating it and for all the hard work!

  • Congratulations on a great start. One thing I noticed is that some of my subscriptions are not on the subscriptions list. When I try to re-subscribe, the app doesn’t seem to remember.

    Also, would you prefer bug reports here in the community page or somewhere else?

    Thanks again for a great app

  • Great start! Just wanted to give some feedback based on what I’ve come across so far :)

    • the bottom nav bar distance between icons should be based on icons, no on labels (posts is way too big). Also the margin on the side could be a bit smaller
    • faster way to up/down vote (prob. top of my list)
    • posting + editing
    • tapping in the background while a menu is open shouldn’t trigger anything other than dismissing the menu
    • a place to see all my posts & comments (posts is missing completely afaik)
    • the blue highlight for own replies should stretch to the edge
    • is there no pull to refresh for the post view?
    • when replying, there should probably be a "really discard" warning, or it should be saved as a draft that reopens if you open the reply again. It currently just disappears and I have the feeling someone will inevitably loose an hour worth of text by accident ^^

    I think it looks really promising so far. I like how everything gets out of the way while scrolling and I love how minimalistic everything feels. Scrolling also seems really smooth, which I can’t stress enough. Really impressed so far, I’m excited to see what’s coming up. I think it’s great that you’re polishing the core features first, I think that’s the right approach!

    Thanks for your work :)

  • Cool just downloaded! How would you say your app differs/excels from others like Memmy? Regardless, I am excited to see where you take it, nice job so far!

26 comments