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1y ago

[Self Promo] I've just made Avelon (a native iOS app for Lemmy) available for download!

Hi there fellow Apple enthusiasts!

Yesterday I announced that my native iOS app for Lemmy called Avelon is finally ready for testing, and I figured some people here might also be interested in checking it out!

My focus for the app has been performance, design and ease of use. As you can probably tell I got a lot of inspiration from Apollo and other iOS-first apps - but I think I've added my own cool spin on both the design and functionality.

Here's a couple screenshots of the app:

If you wanna try it out I'd greatly appreciate any feedback/suggestions so I know what to focus on next! I think the core experience is pretty solid already, but the app still lacks some important features such as adding new posts.

Download Avelon (Testflight)

Avelon is developed in Swift using almost enitrely SwiftUI. For those unfamiliar, SwiftUI is the newest UI library by Apple intended to replace things like UIKit over time. SwiftUI is cross platform, so Avelon also runs on macOS actually, though the UI is not tweaked to fit mac just yet. The tech is really great to work with, and it makes it super easy to fit right into iOS. I posted some more details about the project over on the community page for the app here if you wanna check it out.

Thanks, let me know what you think!

LemmyClient @lemmy.world

I've just made Avelon (a native iOS app for Lemmy) available for download!

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126 comments

The 3rd party app scene flourishing for Lemmy is the perfect "fuck you".

Downloaded. Looks really good so far
- Awesome, looking forward to hearing what you think!
  
  Didn’t even finish submitting my feedback before you pushed an update lol. Keep up the good work

really enjoying the app so far, the onboarding process is amazing. I’d love an option to have big thumbnails when using the large post option like this: https://files.catbox.moe/6y6wzl.jpeg
- Good idea! I'll look at adding this as an option

Looks good so far. I’m really missing the swipe to up/downvote, reply, collaps, report options in compact mode. Any plans for something like that?
- Definitely, I've implemented a few swipe actions already, but they're still a bit buggy so I need to rework the gestures before it's ready to release.
  Edit: The latest release now has customizable swipe gestures!
- Collapse seems to work for me. Otherwise, agreed. It’s much snappier than Memmy (what I’ve been using mostly thus far), on the upside!
  Edit: also would like an option to see both upvote and downvote count
  
  Collapse on tap works just fine for me as well. I was talking about the swiping gestures mostly.

Oh my God! This is my favorite Lemmy app now. I've been looking for a good native app and this is it! So fluid, fast loading, it's awesome!!!
Keep up the good work, can't wait for new updates.

Commenting from Avelon. App is very smooth! I don’t know if it’s just me, having that subscriptions on the leftmost side on the nav bar kinda threw me off, was expecting posts there haha

And here I thought nothing was going to pull me away from Voyager/WefWef
This is damn good
- Voyager doesn’t have full screen gestures yet (swiping to get back to feed), so I’ve been looking around.
  Liftoff! has so far best matched my Apollo style lurk browsing habits. Although the feed is a little more busy looking.
  
  Gestures work no problem in Voyager here.
  
  It does? Like I can do that from this post to get back to my feed right now.

Does it have Apollo’s full width swipe back? That’s the one thing I have yet to see implemented with any other app ever. As someone who just broke their wrist it’d be a damn godsend.
- I really want this too actually, but I honestly have no idea how Apollo did this. Might have to write the whole iOS-navigation-UI-stuff from scratch which is a bit much. I considered adding a floating back button of some kind - not quite the same, but better with a broken wrist hopefully.
  
  Here you go. It was a custom implementation but i don’t know enough about iOS development to say how difficult it would be to implement.
- Liftoff has this feature. You just need to do the TestFlight build
  
  Ooh thank you
  
  Just got liftoff, it’s so perfect!!! Thank you ❤️
- Hmm, what do you mean by this exactly? Dragging from anywhere on the right-hand edge of the screen?
  
  In Apollo there was a setting that allowed you to swipe to go back from anywhere, not just from the edge of the screen. Super nice if you have a large phone since you don't have to stretch your fingers as much.

Hey, one of the Mlem devs here, Welcome to the club. Be advised we are hitting issues getting on the AppStore, apparently Apple says that we are "exploiting the popularity of the Lemmy trademark". You might have to deal with that once you submit... Good Luck, Your app is looking good. ❤️
- It sometimes makes you wonder if the App store employees think before sending pushback like that.
  
  The latest episode of ATP had a big rant about how fucking stupid app review is. It honestly seems like it’s being done by ChatGPT or something it’s so fucking stupid.

So apparently Avelon doesn’t support iOS 15. So that’s a no go for me. If you aren’t specifically targeting iOS 16+ API’s consider targeting lower version of IOS. It’s why I’ll keep using Memmy.
- Probably a dumb question, but I have to ask anyways: can you not upgrade or do you choose not to?
  
  I choose not to upgrade my phone. ;). So no, I can’t upgrade without upgrading the hardware.
- My OG SE is stuck on 15, was disappointed to see this as well. Memmy has some minor performance issues on this phone so I was psyched to try something truly native.

Just downloaded it and the interface is stunning. The app is fluid and smooth, I’m surprised it’s so polished. Nice job!
- Really glad to hear that, worked hard on polishing the core stuff and making the app as smooth as possible. Thanks!

I’ll check it out. Thanks for your hard work!

I’m quite a fan of voyager (née wefwef), but out of curiosity, I tend to install all lemmy apps and give them a whirl.
I have to say, there is quite a lot to like about your app. I’m very curious to see where it goes next.

The onboard flow is bar none the best in the Fediverse. UI is great too.
I think the UX, especially the tab choices and arrangement, are sub par. In particular, I would rethink some of the tab drill down. Subscriptions on the left when the default state is to not be logged in, is weird. I think I would hide that entirely until a user is logged in, or find a better way to default to or drill into your subscriptions after logging in.
- Arrangement definitely looks off. The icons should have the same distance in between and the labels should just overflow. Also stretch more to the edge

Looks and feels good so far! Would suggest settings for NSFW behavior. For example, As of now, posts are blurred and when clicked upon they are displayed. If you scroll past the image they are still visible if you go back. Avalon for example, "re blurs” it of you scroll past it, an behavior I like.
- I don't think this is allowed by Apple, think I heard some reddit devs talking about this a couple years ago. If Lemmy itself gets more finegrained NSFW-settings I could definitely look at integrating it tho
  
  On, thanks for the reply! 👍🏻

App looks gorgeous! Once it has some more features parity to memmy or voyager I can definitely see myself switching to this.
Do you have a community yet to discuss the app?
- Thanks! Yeah, the community is !avelon@lemm.ee
  
  Ah, support for Lemmy community links is missing I guess 😅 Avelon opens the link in Mail. Anyway, thanks for the very good work, I already love the app (Memmy user here)

You can't sort by Top: 1 hour, 6 Hour, 12 Hour. That's a no go from me, because this site needs that. Sorting by Hot is broken.
- Is that not a API restriction?
  
  I think it was introduced in the 0.18 api
  
  Memmy does it.
  
  I know nothing about APIs, but I can do this on the Connect and the Summit app. Wish there was an Android Version, I'd love to try your App.

This needs thumbnails on the left as well as marking post read on opening thumbnails, other than that it looks great!
Onboarding looks great and the performance is perhaps the best I’ve ever experienced trying various Lemmy apps.
- Yep, an ability to switch thumbnails in compact mode to the left would be great. Agree with everyone else so far, really polished and super fast performance. Looking forward to seeing this mature.
- Also, I can’t seem to work out how to tap someone’s name to access their profile. Since this app doesn’t handle links to other Lemmy instances internally (the “here” in your OP opens the browser rather than actually taking me to your post), I wanted to comment on your app’s community by finding it via your profile.
  Am I just not hitting the correct pixels? Or are there no profile pages just now?
  Also, the community icons are missing from the posts in the feed.
  
  Or are there no profile pages just now?
  No profile pages yet unfortunately. This + adding posts are probably the biggest features missing atm.
  Since this app doesn’t handle links to other Lemmy instances internally
  I'm planning to look at this, but it probably requires a bit of magic in the background to work properly.
  
  Bug report: every comment (and presumably post) is showing as having 1 more upvote than they actually have.

Hi @evgiz@lemm.ee, since this is your own app, can you please tag this as [Self Promo] (prepend the post title)? We're tightening up rules regarding self promo and while we're not removing your post, we want to clarify this post.
Side note, your app is listed in the pinned post of iOS apps. Please leave a comment there if you want it updated (e.g., new link or AppStore link when it's released).
- Done, thanks for letting me know!
  
  Thank you!

Summary of me looking at the app for about 20 minutes:
Having subscriptions as it’s own tab is confusing as hell to me and leads to a weird UX as the UI first needs to switch to the posts tab before triggering the navigation there. This results in a harsh change of the content followed by the pushing of the new screen. Took me a while to realize what was happening as I thought there was a bug that added images to the subscription rows as this happens fast enough to not make you realize you are seeing Posts/All for a split second.
All/local/… does not react to changes in the set post style. Pull to refresh will not help. Only switching via the Navigation Bar menu will update the post layout.
While we are at it. A preview for this setting would be great.
Switching to the account tap will always return you to the first screen and not the sunscreen you were on previously. At least that problem does not exists for posts.
Guests instances could really use an explanation about what they do.
The NavigationBar is very not iOS like.
The back button should have a meaningful label and having no title until you scroll feels wrong. I think you are trying to emulate the butchered detail view of the mail app, but without the back button text this just feels empty but adding it might be enough to make it work.
Also there is a UI bug when the navigationBar (dis)appears where the back button vanishes first/gets added before the bar appears.
Tapping next to the comments count beneath the post sometimes collapses/expands the post. Sometimes not.
Sorry if I sound a bit harsh. I see a lot of potential in this app. But also a lot of work.
Onboarding is pretty great though.
Keep on keeping on!

The speed and smoothness are amazing! Missing swipe to vote and better link handling.

Looks nice, will use it for now.
One thing I would like suggest is in the login screen. Why not put a drop-down menu there where users can select the most used servers? Or something autocomplete like while typing the domain.
Thanks for all your effort. Really looking forward for future updates and AppStore release.

Tried using it and it crashed on every attempt to post a reply to something. That being said I’m on the iOS17 dev beta so that could have something to do with it. Looked good though.
- I've heard about this reply crash several times but haven't been able to reproduce it, if it's an iOS 17 issue that makes sense! I'm not on the beta yet myself
  
  Let’s try this again from your app.…

I'm an Android person. But I wanted to say thank you for your work on that app for the community! You're awesome!

I can’t log into my instance. It gets as far asking for my MFA code, but it’s never correct. (Yes, the code works on other apps/devices.)
EDIT: Actually, I can’t log into Mlem either. It might be my instance. False alarm.

Really, really slick.

Make it defaul to no NSFW post and i will recommend it to my family
- It should block NSFW by default, perhaps its your instance or account settings?

Downloaded. Looks great. Is there a plan to allow multiple account logins?
- Will definitely add multiple account support
  
  Awesome. Thank you.

is it open source?

Have you planned to add a way to tune the font settings?

It looks great! Logging in doesn’t seem to be working though not sure why.

I’m not seeing a way to favorite/save a post for later. Am I just missing it?
- Not added yet unfortunately
  
  That’s alright! It’s a work in progress. It’s really impressive as it is to be honest, even though it has some ways to go.

Very nice! Loving the Explore tab for finding communities, and the animations feel good!
I have a feature request: dark mode thats more of a dark gray than "amoled black". I find the contrast of white text on pitch black too much.
Edit: ...and iPad support would be awesome!

The app looks really nice and already well polished. This smells really nice for the future.

I like where you are going with this. Looks good so far.
I have one feature request. I really liked the way that Apollo would share pictures and videos. A typical use case for me would be find a funny image. Long press to share, send the shared image to any other app that supported sharing using the built in share sheet. That way I could do all kinds of different things. Save to my NAS, run it through a Shortcut send, or to a friend via whatever app.
Keep up the good work!

I use Lemmy almost exclusively on iPad (mini), so this doesn’t quite fill my need.

I love the app but it would be great if it would show a preview of text posts on the home page so I don’t have to click on the post to read it.

It fails to log in for me. It gets past the 2FA step but then fails to log in afterwards. Strange.
- Same here. It won’t accept my MFA code no matter what.

Wow, thank you. Finally a compact view that is actually compact while still telling me everything I need to know about a post. You know it's good when it takes all of 5 seconds to get used to the layout.

Downloaded, so far i’m impressed!

This is what the fediverse needs, nice work

Would love to have an option to block communities/users. Unless I’m dumb and not seeing the option.

Downloaded , thank you ! It’s missing atm font size
- If you increase the font size in the iOS settings Avelon should update as well. I might look at an in-app-setting at some point but I'll prioritize some more important features first!
- FYI, you can also do this on a per app basis via the control menu

Can it be used for kbin as well?
- Kbin currently does not have a public API which is what most developers use to create apps, as such very few people are working on kbin apps and AFAIK they’re not public for testing yet. Artemis by a developer named Harriet (Harriette?) is the only one I know off the top of my head and she’s still in the private stage.

Is it open source?

Excellent job with this app! Like it so far. Will report bugs as discover them. Thanks for sharing!

Great start. Performance is better for me than with Memmy and Mlem! Looking forward to how it evolves.
Swipe actions I miss most atm.

This is probably my favorite out of all the ones I've tried. Only one that comes close is Mlem.
Would love to see some gestures in here but otherwise it is great for a first pass. Nice work! Excited to see where it goes
- Back for some more feedback.
  Comment threads are a little overwhelming and need some spacing or distinction between each individual comment.
  I also can't figure out how to see my posts and go to them with ease (checking for replies and such)
  No notification area...so I'm missing out on replies to my posts.
  Other than those things, it is so smooth and a pleasure to use.

Unfortunately this requires iOS 16. Not going to lose my jailbreak for it sadly

Looks good on my 12 Mini. Thanks!!

Thanks mate

126 comments