Discussion: Lemmy Apps galore! Share your thoughts on them and what comes next!
Hi, [email protected] 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?
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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
Haven't had crashes yet, honestly the only complaint so far using Jerboa on a pixel 5 (lemmy.ca instance if those could play a part in potential issues). Is notifications... They seem to be broken similar to how boost was broken with reddit consistently for me.
I have a constant 1 unread, and flipping the status just makes the numbers weirder, but never less than one. It's like those toggling light puzzles lmao.
Are we the same person? I agree wholeheartedly with this statement. Boost was my Reddit app of choice, my first taste of Lemmy was Jerboa, and the latest updates for Jerboa have been awesome. But I want Boost for Lemmy!
Thunder is my favorite so far but connect is a close second
My favorite reddit apps were boost and relay so I'm very excited for boost coming to lemmy
Thunder loading is really slow for me compared to Liftoff or Mlem, I see very few people talking about this
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.
I just discovered wefwef and love it.
Well haha, I just discovered that it doesn't send me notifications for example...
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.
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
Great to see LJ is back on it!
I have tried these:
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.
Same here
I also like liftoff, but the subscribe button doesn't seem to work for me. It says I need to log in to that instance which isnt right. If I sub in a different app it shows up fine.
My top three are Wefwef, Thunder and Jerboa.
Lemming in 4th place when it catches up!
And well I guess things will change when Boost and Sync for Lemmy arrive.
I started by using Jerboa but switched to Thunder and am loving it.
Jerboa was great too but it had some weird issues (like default homepage wouldn't apply, no matter what I selected as the default in settings it would default to local).
I wish thunder let me have vote/reply buttons instead of swipe gestures but it's not too bad.
Well, Thunder keeps improving day by day, so be sure to keep an eye on it.
I also like Thunder more than Jerboa, but until this day Jerboa keeps to be more usable, maybe Liftoff and Jerboa are the most useful right now, aside the stock PWA.
This fact makes it hard to pick a favorite at this point. Thunder used to be my favorite out of the bunch, but I have been enjoying Liftoff the most the past few days. I agree, we should keep checking out each app periodically before settling on anything.
Yep I have the same exactly. Also I use the actual website too as it's the best one for foldables that I can see
I don't have a foldable phone, but I can see it being the superior experience for them, and let's be honest, is less likely to fail with this early app phase 😅
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.
Is it available on the app store?
You can find Thunder on their Github or using the IzzyOnDroid repo.
Cool thanks. I've never tried side loading anything on my phone before. I might give it a whirl for fun.
Enjoy! The amount of dev support for Lemmy is pretty exciting.
Thunder would be the obvious one for me but the lack of a swipe action to return to the fees from a post is a showstopper for me.
Yeah, that's the one thing for me as well, so I've been using liftoff since it has the functionality, I will move over to sync when it gets released though.
I'm also a big Sync fan.
Connect is closing the gap quickly, and has not supplanted Liftoff as my daily driver.
My problem with connect is that if I touch a comment it changes colour to cyan and makes the text unreadable, apart from that it's pretty decent.
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..
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.
Summit has login since a few updates
It can be clearer but Summit's sign in button is at the top left. You can also perform any action. You will see a message prompting you to sign in with a button for it.
Hol up, there's a Slide for Lemmy??
Yup. It just isn't in the play store. Github only, afaik.
Here's a page with at least a majority, if not all, apps currently available https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/
and here's slide in specific
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.
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.
Yeah definitely a huge instance after the 18 upgrade!
Connect is currently updating so rapidly that it might remain on my phone even after Sync, Boost, and Artemis launch.
It's pretty remarkable how active development has been for a few apps thus far.
Agreed. I'm loving it.
honestly the web app is enough for me until Sync arrives.
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 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.
I've been using liftoff and the experience has vastly improved since I switched to an instance that isn't regularly returning 503.
I've also been pretty satisfied with wefwef for the most part, although posts fail to load sometimes and I see random errors (not sure if this is on wefwef or Lemmy.world).
The UI, features, and infinite scrolling is great, hoping they can provide a material theme soon rather than iOS but I'm getting used to it tbh.
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 like Liftoff, didn't work too well at first but got an update yesterday and since then it's smooth sailing. Ahoi!
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 got my first iPhone a couple of years ago and I am never buying another one. So damn hard just to sideload the good apps
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.
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).
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.
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.
I have something: https://natoboram.github.io/Leanish/lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
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.
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.
Voyager/wefwef is the best one rn honestly, even if the design language is iOS
Waiting for Sync and Boost 🙏🙏
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.
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.
Jerboa's improved a lot lately, but I've also been using Connect when it has problems. When the Lemmy versions of popular Reddit apps come out, I might switch to one of them since I expect them to be more refined out of the gate.
The thing I think I want the most is a clone of RIF's comment navigation. Being able to easily skip through long threads is a feature I didn't realize I'd miss, but I used it all the time on there. Jerboa kind of has it now, but it doesn't let you move up through child comments and the "active" comment is always at the top of the screen.
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.
Here's the community on Lemmy with download links as well.
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.
Use Native Alpha
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. 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'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.
Aside from the lackluster UI polishment, Liftoff is a very decent client, already feels better than the official Reddit app.
That's not a high standard to meet, though
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?
I tried Jerboa and it was okay. I'm now using Connect and it is fantastic!
In terms of web apps, I've tried:
shameless plugFor android apps, I'm waiting for Sync.