FYI, Lemmy and Kbin are Progressive Web Apps, meaning you can install them as regular apps to your phone's home screen

spiritedpause@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 801 points –

On iOS: tap the share button in browser => add to home screen On Android: tap the 3 dot menu button in browser => tap "install" or "add to home screen"

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Been trying the place and just have jerboa a shot in comparison. The actual app is better by miles. So much faster than the browser.

Clean animations, simple tap to collapse threads

App > browser for now

Agreed. I'm liking Jerboa quite a bit so far. Feels similar to Boost a long while back.

tap to collapse threads

I haven't been able to collapse threads on Jerboa, how do you do that? Am I missing something?

At first it wasn't doing it for me but since last night it has

Tapping anywhere in the text of a comment seems to do it, holding like i would back on Boost for Reddit simply removes the extra toolbar at the bottom, and the title area did nothing

Sometimes it just doesn't but i find restarting the app fixes that, though i usually just move on to the next topic when that happens

Maybe the F-Droid version is just behind, I can't get that to work. Thanks for the input!

Using Mlem myself and with the recent update it’s much more stable and definitely more responsive than the web app. Really scratches that Apollo-shaped itch.

I just wish it used screen real-estate better. I'm using it right now. I wish it could replace RIF.

As an alternative, there's also Native Alpha and Hermit (my personal favorite) on Android. Play with the settings to make it full screen and frameless (no address bar at the top). It also has pull down to refresh.

On kbin, you can then go to your settings and sticky the navbar as well so that it's always at the top as you browse. Personal preference and all that.

Jerboa is a good alternative for Android, too. I've been using it for a bit now and it seems to work great.

I just tried installing kbin as described in the post and downloading Hermit and I'm not really seeing a difference between the two options. Am I just missing something?

Personal preferences. I like to keep my stuff self-contained. This keeps browsing in the Hermit environment for that PWA rather than in your browser. You aren't really missing anything though. It might just not suit your needs and be redundant.

Wait, where's the option to sticky the top bar? I am not seeing it in my settings but maybe I'm just blind.

This is on kbin. Username in the upper right, Profile, scroll down through the stuff there, look for the small cog. Turn on the option to sticky navbar - you may want to toggle infinite scrolling and maybe the show icons options while there as well.

Oh wow that was kind of hidden, but you just improved this site for me so much. Thank you! Some of these seem better defaults than what is present.

Infinite scrolling not being default makes sense IMO. It's a highly addictive feature, and a bit part of these open source, federated communities is they try to avoid the addictiveness that big tech platforms try to enforce onto their users if possible.

Sometimes the feature is highly liked by people, so they add it as a non-default option.

If you click on compact view you get the settings page for that

Hermit isn't open source. This makes the code not publicly auditable, which means that verification of security by a third party is impossible.

Would you happen to know if Native Alpha is offhand?

Yeah. Native Alpha is open source.

Awesome. Thanks. I'll probably make the switch then. 👍

Just keep in mind that it uses your system's WebView. If you're not rooted/don't have a custom ROM, that's likely going to be Google's proprietary version of Chrome.

I use DivestOS, which comes with Mulch WebView.

I tried Hermit before, assumed these features will be locked in premium and didn't try it more, thank you!

Any idea why it changed my top bar color to gray while the icons (wifi, etc) are black? It's not a dealbreaker but it would be nice if there's a solution I'm missing.

Surprisingly, those particular features aren't locked behind premium. As for the top bar color, you might be able to change the theme in Lemmy/kbin itself in your profile settings to one that suits what you're looking for.

I tried Hermit and noticed that Voyager doesn't automatically switch between Dark and Light theme (in the night / morning). Workaround is to kill (force close) the app and open it again.

Do you also face this issue? I can't remember if with Chrome I was facing it..

It saved my sessions in Hermit, so I don't think I had that issue. But I definitely had that issue when using Brave with it not saving my settings/session between loads.

Now I'm trying this "Native Alpha" app. And with this one seems to adapt the system theme (dark or light) without needing a restart of the power app.

I think I'll keep this app to run voyager!

For what it's worth, Native Alpha is also open source. I found that out after the fact. So if that's something you value, Native Alpha might be the better choice overall. Hope it serves you well!

Yes and it also works out of the box for (I haven't had to change any setting...). For example in the other app I had to configure some stuff to hide the top URL bar or something similar.

Here I just added wefwef url app, I created the icon and voilà!

Still a better user experience than the official Reddit app.

Thats cool, but now it doesn’t have a back button… how do you navigate?

Probably via a swipe from the phone site? Most modern phones do this

That’s what I assumed as well, but Kbin won’t swipe….

Swiping works for me on iPhone. My only issue is there's no way to refresh the page from the PWA on iPhone (to my knowledge).

Posted from kbin.social after "Add to home screen"

For me, I can refresh the entire PWA app on my iphone by hitting the hamburger menu on top left, then the home icon on the little sub menu bar top right. But you're right this doesn't help if you're inside a thread or anywhere else. Is there a gesture to do this maybe? Similar to the back button being a left swipe?

iPhone with iOS 16 and swiping does not work on kbin PWA but does on other PWA apps. Zooming doesn’t change the situation

At least for lemmy it works in my iphone - i dont use the kbin variant unfortunately…

Probably you could try to zoom out of the page before the swipe… Sometimes, if a website is wider than the screen, the back swipe does not work correctly

On Android, you can configure an edge swipe to mean "back". Though android also has a back button built into the ui, so it doesn't really mean much.

On iOS swiping from the sides works for back/forward.

On the macOS 14 preview, the app gets back/forward menu items with keyboard shortcuts.

I love that this is possible and I gave it a go but for some reason scrolling in the browser is really hard to do, it keeps adding new posts while I'm scrolling and moves everything around making it near impossible to actually read, I thought it might be just loading still but it doesn't ever come to a stop, not sure if this is just me ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

This happens to me on desktop Firefox also. Even if I've sorted by Top, new posts with 1 upvote will get inserted at the top of the feed repeatedly.

as far as I know this is a bug that has been identified, although I don't know if there's a fix for it yet

I am on the IOS web app and it still happens to me. I’ve had better experience on my browser.

I use jerboa for lemmy. Not sure how different it is though. Never used that webapp

I find that jerboa has some missing features that are there in the web app. Things like being able to go from a comment in your inbox to that same comment in context in it's thread.

Mybe I will try to add that feature to the app tomorrow if no other contributer hasn't already. Development of the app seems to move quite fast and a bunch of people are adding stuff. But I agree, there are still a lot of smaller and bigger things missing or wonky.

Nice to hear that it's active

Actually I ran a current development build of the app which seems to have the feature already. There is a small chain icon next to the vote arrows which jumps to the comment and it's parent and allows to load even more context. So maybe it will ship in the next app update when release :)

Oh yeah, you're right. The main version has it too.

Have you written for the app before? How did yiu find it? I took a very quick look and plan to try working on it at some point but I don't know kotlin at all. It'll take some spinup for me.

Yes, I made two small contributions till now. The maintainers seem pretty responsive when new PRs are opened and open to the stuff people are adding. Did not have a thorough look through all the code of the app yet but what I have seen seems structured quite good and I look forward to working more with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Am a Java Dev for work, quite some time since I last worked on an Android App but making small contributions first should get you started

I'll give it a shot as I have time. I'm primarily a Python developer with experience in Go, C, and a smattering of other languages. Should be easy enough to learn enough to contribute some small PRs.

It does have that feature already, you need to press the link button in the inbox below the comment.

That works for you in the app? It works for me on the web but not in the app.

I've been doing it in the Jerboa app.

Edit: I lied, it's not directly from my inbox. NVM. I go to the commenter's comments and go to the context from there. The comment is usually first or second on their list, so it's not hard to find. But yeah, extra steps. I wish I could reply from the inbox in general.

Someone else pointed out that the dev version of the app may have this feature now, so this feature should be coming pretty soon!

Thanks! Right now I am willing to give devs all kinds of slack on what features they offer. They have their hands full with the massive growth the last couple weeks, and I am perfectly happy waiting.

I'm primarily using the pwa for now. Jerboa has a nicer UI in most cases, but pwa is a lot smoother, less buggy, and external links open up a lot faster. Also, jerboa has a bunch of minor annyonaces, like trying to select text and it keeps minimizing the comment instead, or how it opens Lemmy links in an external browser.

A bit more devtime and I'll switch to it, especially if they add a feature to group multiple communities in a single entry.

Some days, I feel like I'm the only person that used Reddit and never touched any of the applications for it.

I used old.Reddit on my phone and desktop until I switched to iPhone. Then I switched to Apollo because was like using old Reddit but formatted for phones.

First thing I did. Makes it a little more app like. Still can’t wait to see what clients get released in the next few months.

Makes it very difficult to open posts in a new tab though, I scroll and open like 6 posts to go through afterwards.

Oh damn, I'm gonna need to make sure I do this later.

I believe this next drop of iOS is going to support push notifications in safari. Are there plans for the pwa to support this? It’s the only reason I really use native apps anymore.

Both have native apps on Android and iOS that are better imo.

Yes even KBin has an Android app now too.

What's the KBin app called? Last I checked, the iOS Lemmy app is in beta, and the only Android app for Lemmy is Jerboa.

On some websites when you add an icon for the web page on your phone it saves as a 'web app'. It will open directly into the web page without the browser bar on top.

Link to the native iOS kbin app that’s outside of TestFlight? Same for lemmy?

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Thanks for that. It's actually a lot better than the app I'm currently using, lol. (Though, I'm sure it will improve).

this was the first thing i did upon discovering kbin.. and I use it for a lot of other sites too, namely forums and the like.

If only the launcher I use on android supported homescreen icons :( (AIO)

Don't forget to check out !kbinStyles@kbin.social for UX improvements (which will work on mobile Firefox)

With all these nice scripts, I'd use kbin if they fixed the bug where voting sometimes sends you to an error page, and added hiding posts on read.

I had never heard of this and I was really confused how I got a kbin app on my phone. When I got home and tried to "install the app" on my tablet I couldn't figure out how to install it. I searched on the Play Store and couldn't find it. I double checked the app information on my phone's icon and it said "Installed from the Google Play Store", so I was really confused.

Thank you just did this with Chrome on Android! Easier than having to open a new chrome tab every time for sure

Already did that for Lemmy and Mastodon. I have more problems with Jerboa then benefits.

I kept getting some json error with Jerboa. It'd just show a dark screen. I didn't try to troubleshoot at all, just used the mobile site.

What problems?

The most annoying is that the space between two words got deleted, if i use backspace, to correct an word i was writing on.

For example what happens to a sentence, when i use backspace:

"This is for examol" (backspace) "This is forexamo" (backspace) "This isforexam" (backspace) "Thisisforexa"

This is fucking annoying.

I haven't had anything like this.. maybe you should try a different keyboard?

The not being able to click on a message in the inbox and get to the comment in context is a big one for me.

Apparently the latest build on github has fixed this!

Yeah, that's the main issue I have with it, but it's generally pretty good and I'm using it anyway.

Also: No option to open links in real browser rather than the web view thing No notifications for replies (not that important)

Just FYI you can do this in the new version of MacOS (Sonoma) and add sites to your dock which is quite nice.

You can do the same on windows! I forgot it was a feature tbh its weird not having the top of my browser lol

I’ve just been using Lemmy in PWA mode on my iPad and have switched back to viewing it in a normal browser. The lack of a back button was too annoying. 😄

Thank you for posting, didn't know this.

I'd like to add that for Android users installing Kbin, if you can't find the app anywhere, it's listed as "/kbin" at the bottom of your app drawer because of the backslash. Lemmy users will find it sorted under "L".

Any updates on Mlem? I tried installing TestFlight but it says the beta is full.

I’m testing it, but it is pretty rough still. A lot of features or settings not working or not sticking.

Former Apollo user on Reddit so I’m a bit spoiled.

Yeah, guess we’ll be patiently waiting for things to get ironed out. All I really want is swipe to collapse.

Did that with lemmy, but at least in my case it just happens too often that I get an infinite loading circle when switching threads and then I have to reload the entire page, which isn't possible when not in the real browser. Even closing the web app and reopening them doesn't help but once I open the page in Safari it works just fine.

Mlem for iOS just got an update which gives us the compact thread style I much prefer over the current web app look but it seems like I can't edit comments there and I also don't see any notifications so there's still a lot of work to be done before it becomes an option.

And kbin I just don't use on the phone at all as long as we can't collapse comment chains.

Yeah! Kbin PWA is great. (Though there's a very small amount of sidescroll that makes my frontend web dev heart cry a bit... maybe I should open a pull request for it :))

Though it seems to override my screen orientation settings, making it hard to read while lying in bed XD

Same here, specifically it does not seem to respect the auto-rotate off setting.

Please :)

I also wish enlarged images were wrapped in the same box as the post title. Currently it feels like a separate post.

Thanks for the heads up! Scrolling is smoother now while waiting for jerboa to fix their app.

Hey everyone, I just joined 5 minutes ago. Been a Redditor for 7y 2m. I'm actually really going to miss reddit and many of the communities such as r/idiotsincars, r/catastrophicfailures, and well a couple hundred more over followed over the years. I'm hoping I can find more community here though. I never felt connected to the users on Reddit. Maybe it will be different here.

Does anyone know of any apps for Lemmy on iOS? I’m using Mlem and Memmy through Test Flight, as well as the Lemmy web app as explained in the post, but I’d like to know if there’s any more I could test out as well

FYI, for Firefox on android, I had to use Firefox Nightly for this, as the main version doesn't support PWAs (for some reason)

Edit: I take it back, when I tried to do the install on regular Firefox a few days ago, it didn't work. It does work now, so regular Firefox works for this!

It does support them. At least on Android 13 and Firefox version 114.1.1.

Thanks for the correction, not sure why the PWA install didn't work for me on regular Firefox a few days ago, but it does work now.

On the same version as you and I've installed this on Firefox but it behaves like a regular website (has an address bar, tabs, etc.). Some other sites installed like this don't have those.

Edit: I tried installing it again and now it works as intended. Maybe some backend update between when I first installed and now?

I had the exact same experience as you. No idea why, but you aren't alone.

Not sure, to be honest. It worked for me from the day I created my account.

Also, lol, lemmy is eating my comments.

Created Lemmy account in case this happens again.

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Same here, I had to clear the link off my home screen and reopen Kbin on Firefox to get a version that wasn't just a web link. For some reason, it looks so much cleaner to me now without the address bar at the bottom.

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I'm signed up on both, now. So let it be known; I am Geronimo

On Firefox mobile, the back button does not work for me when using the installed app. Anyone else seeing this?

Yeah. I had to hit back multiple times for it to work.

What the hell, I was just recently talking about it. I'm happy to hear it's already a thing. Thanks!

has anyone any idea how to change the language? I'm unable to do that in my profile settings

PWAs only work on Chromium web browsers, though there are some that install on Firefox on Mobile. Yes, I can jsut use Brave, but it's syncing is awful and I bet there are old accounts of mine floating with an expired passphrase. Granted, I now save my bookmarks, passwords etc. in various other places where I can access them from any device anywere.

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But i dont put icons on my home screen only, only use my app drawer 😔

If you use iOS, you can add it to a home screen tab and then hide the tab and it will still appear in the app library.

Is there a way to make the PWA not open a new tab each time in Firefox though?

That's not the PWA that's a bookmarked url. Try reinstalling it, the Android PWA just released recently.

Yup. Pre-PWA the icon was a blurry mess and now after reinstalling it's nice and shiny!