They're doing great work over there too! We saw they just launched--congrats to them!

For what it's worth, we don't like the drama either, and we're hoping that this will be the end of it and we can focus all our energies on what matters: updates!

There are a couple smaller reasons, but the big one is that we use NavigationStack to handle our core view navigation--it's a truly monumental improvement over the old NavigationView, and lets us do things like build an iPad version without rewriting all our nav stuff, but it is unfortunately only compatible with iOS 16+.

I know that's probably not a super satisfactory answer, but I'd rather be transparent than spin some PR nonsense at you.

Yes! We will continue using TestFlight to try out our beta features, so if you want the cutting (and maybe buggy) edge of our development, stay on there. If you just want the stable, reliable app, the App Store version is your friend.

Progressing well! We're hoping to have the next TestFlight build out soon.

We sure will! That's currently slated as a 1.1 feature, so it should be coming shortly after our App Store release

Haha yeah it's definitely been a bit bumpy, but the core team works really well together and we're optimistic that it's smooth sailing from here on out. We're hoping our next release will restore some of that confidence--it's got some exciting features planned!

The image viewer is our #1 priority right now. To zoom you can tap the image once in the post view--we're working on getting a hotfix out shortly to make that work the intuitive way, where tapping the image in feed opens the quick viewer.

Longer-term, we're working on a much more robust, fully-featured media viewer, but it's a complex piece of code and we want to get it right--it's slated for our next milestone (1.1, targeted Aug 5).

That's him! He founded Mlem a couple years ago as a pet project and is responsible for basically all of our alpha code. When Lemmy took off, he stepped away from the project for personal reasons largely driven by the scope of the app suddenly exploding from "hobby project" to "production app." He handed ownership of the codebase over to one of the current team members, and it is now maintained collectively by the Mlem Group.

Mlem dev here—couldn’t agree more about Gavin, he’s a fantastic guy. Gave us some helpful tips about getting through App Store review. Massive props to him for getting that app up and running so fast.

It looks like the biggest domain count driver by far is image fetching for link posts, since rendering a website preview involves fetching both the preview image from the linked website and the favicon from Google (favicons account for all those t1.gstatic calls). Disabling website previews and the associated image fetching code cut the domain list down to just Lemmy instances. Mastodon appears to proxy image requests through the instance, which prevents that high domain count. Lemmy has recently added that feature, but right now only instances running the very latest Lemmy code perform image proxying.

We're looking into adding enhanced privacy features to 2.0; we'll include one to disable fetching favicons and image thumbnails, since favicons especially are a known tracking/fingerprinting vector.

Mlem is SwiftUI and FOSS! I know there are some issues with the current App Store build (weeps in janky scrolling) but we've got a major update hitting beta tomorrow and the App Store as soon as Apple will allow that's going to fix it.

Thanks for the download, and I hope you enjoy it! We’re firm believers in the native Swift experience, even though it takes a little longer to develop in

It’s coming! We’ve got development slated to start early August, it should enter TestFlight beta sometime shortly after then.

I'm really sorry that happened to you! We're refining that UX to make that much harder to accidentally do in the future.

We have an update coming down the line soon that fixes this--it's taking longer than expected because I've needed to rewrite pretty much all of our post loading code, which has been operating on the same core since early beta and at this point is stretched past its limit. We're hoping to enter TestFlight within the next week.

It is, though it might be a little while before it's ready. Apple charges a small fee for push notifications and the project currently has no money to speak of. We're looking into options for setting up a proper donation system, but it's a bit complicated as we're a team and not a solo dev.

It's coming! We merged it into our dev codebase early this morning, so if it passes our internal testing it'll be out soon. We're currently sitting in App Store review, so the next build won't be out until that clears, but once we're over that hurdle we've got a whole slate of much-needed improvements planned.

We're reluctant to give concrete time estimates since our development time is constrained by our day jobs and other responsibilities, but we hope to have 2.0 in early TestFlight on a schedule roughly in line with our release cadence (~2mo).

We don't plan to release any new features to the 1.x codebase after 1.3, but we will continue to fix major bugs and maintain compatibility against changes to the Lemmy API while we bring 2.0 up.

We've got a much nicer image viewer in the works--quicklook is just a bandaid solution to offer some way to zoom and share images.

As a side note, quicklook is actually supposed to have that gesture. It works that way in UIKit, but it's broken in the SwiftUI quicklook. Thanks Apple!

Thank you! We're lucky to have such a great community--all your feedback means the world to us.