1y ago

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?

60 comments

honestly the web app is enough for me until Sync arrives.

I've tried: Liftoff, WefWef, and Thunder.
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 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.
edit: OK, Thunder is my favorite now 😆
- Tried jerboa and it's perfectly good enough. Threading could use slightly more distinction but its snappy and lightweight.
  Also am waiting for Boost for Lemmy though as that was my Reddit app of choice. Time will tell if I end up on it or stick with jerboa
  
  Used Jerboa for a couple weeks, but got sick of the constant crashes. Connect and Liftoff were both better than Jerboa imo

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.
- Ooooh is there going to be Sync for Lemmy? I'm a long time Sync user and I'd love to have it back
  
  Ooooh yeah - https://lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy
- Also love wefwef and the ui, every time i open it there's an update or more than one. I used sync for 8 years I believe and can't wait for it to be on lemmy so I'm sure I'll also switch.
- I just discovered wefwef and love it.
- Another Sync afficionado here - their "We officially don't do Reddit anymore, look out for us on Lemmy!" banner July 1st is how I got here!
  
  Welcome on board!

Voyager/wefwef is the best one rn honestly, even if the design language is iOS
Waiting for Sync and Boost 🙏🙏

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 am a former Baconreader user. Connect, with just a few options tweaks, is very close to what Baconreader was. I'm enjoying it.
- I tweaked Connect to look similar to RiF, which is what I used for Reddit. I'm really enjoying it so far.
- connect doesn't seem to let me subscribe to other instances outside of beehaw though? or I'm missing something?
  
  Click the three dots and click subscribe while viewing a community on another instance. You can also subscribe from the left bar. Under your feeds and subscriptions, you can see top communities and subscribe. You can also search at the top of the left bar.

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!
- Also, when you swipe from the left you can see Frontpage, Local, and All. Select Frontpage. That will show you only the what you are subscribed to.
- A swipe on the left side of the screen will reveal your subscriptions.

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.

Using Jerboa atm
- I've been using a few myself and keep going back to Jerboa. I'll keep tooling around but that's my pick so far as well.

I have tried these:
Jerboa
wefwef
Liftoff
Connect
Thunder
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.

I tried Jerboa and it was okay. I'm now using Connect and it is fantastic!

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.
- Same for me. I was finally able to update jerboa after my instance got to 0.18 and holy shit, it improved so much after just a month. Right now I'd say it's more polished than wefwef and connect.
- I fell to my knees in a Walmart when Boost for Lemmy was finally announced. Donate to Ruben here:
  https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/mayayo/

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.

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.

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'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.

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?

Infinity and Dawn for Everything now have early support for Lemmy. See here.
- I can't seem to figure out how to get infinity for everything downloaded. Any advice? I used infinity for reddit and would love to use it for lemmy!
  
  Looks like you can grab the apk here. Pulled that from following the link OP left. You can point obtainium to that URL and enable prerelease to keep it updated.

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.

Damn! A few days ago there was only jeroba. So many now! I really liked wefwef.
Am looking forward to the boost port. That will do it for me.
- It's pretty exciting!
- Boost is my jam. So glad he decided to make the move to Lemmy

In terms of web apps, I've tried:
Voyager (formerly wefwef)
Photon ~~shameless plug~~
For android apps, I'm waiting for Sync.

Thunder has the best UX out of all apps I've tried, and it's not even close. And I'm fairly certain I've tried all of them.
- It has good ui, I love it too. But its inability to sort comments on post is dealbreaker for me... or am I missing the updates/features? 😅🙏
  For now, I use Liftoff and web-ui..

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.

Connect is currently updating so rapidly that it might remain on my phone even after Sync, Boost, and Artemis launch.
- Agreed. I'm loving it.
- It's pretty remarkable how active development has been for a few apps thus far.

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 :::
- You might want to consider using another browser dedicated to it, or going for Hermit or Native Alpha. Personally, I like Kiwi Browser(Chrome based) and Fennec (Firefox-based) - both support browser extensions/add-ons.

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
- 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.
- 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.
  
  I have something: https://natoboram.github.io/Leanish/lemmy.world/c/leanish@lemmy.world
  There's no Android build yet since it's easier to just focus on features first and deployment later, but I do plan on having a SSR build, a PWA build and an Android build.

60 comments