Summit - A Lemmy reader

idunnololz@lemmy.world to Android@lemmy.world – 73 points –
Summit - Lemmy Reader - Apps on Google Play
play.google.com

Hello! I recently just released a Lemmy reader app for open beta. I've been working on the app since the black out about a week ago.

The app is will very much a work in progress however the core reader functionality should be working. I will continue to work on the app and estimate it will likely like a month before all core features will be implemented.

That being said, I've been having a lot of trouble browsing Lemmy on web and I still think the app is an upgrade over the raw web experience.

If anyone is interested please give the app a try and let me know what you think!

Here's a quick demo as well: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MMpMHwzTuII

Update

I started a community at https://lemmy.world/c/summit. I will try to post frequent updates there.

52

Is it on F-droid?

I second this, too. I always prefer Open Source apps.

Unfortunately it is unlikely that I will open source this project but we shall see. I respect the open source community, I just historically have enjoyed working close source more.

how can one enjoy working close source? You are welcome to keep your devlopment private, rather than putting it on an open source development protal like GitHub, and just release it under the GPL so the rest of us can learn from your work, without you having to put up with annoying "developers" on the internet.

how can one enjoy working close source?

Are you really asking how one could enjoy creating an app A) without the general public nitpicking at how and why you're doing it and B) reserving the ability to make some money off the app?

I think maybe you misunderstand how Libre Software works. Nobody wants to take away control from the author of forbid them from making money. We just want to have control over our devices and the software that runs on them. We want to be able to see what it does and that it doesn't have any malicious functionality. Lemmy itself is Libre Software and all software should be like this.

So you don't care about your users then. You don't want them to be able to see what you app does on their device and be able to control it.

Hell yeah man, you cranked that out so quick, I don't know what language you're writing it in, but let me know if you want some help with any features, I'd love to pitch in!

I'm a mid level dev

The work is pretty manageable at the moment so I should be ok. Thank you for the offer!

Is it on fdroid and is it foss? I have no access to google play or any other google service by choice and i only use foss apps whenever possible.

May I ask why you don't use any of those?

Because google exerts centralizing control over things. Where i live here in the US if you are not on the play store you may as well not exist. I am led to understand that in much of the eastern world such as china having multiple app stores and such is quite common. I personally choose not to use services from these large companies firstly to limit their abuse of my data, and secondly because most of these companies are american and must bow the knee to the american governmyth to continue to exist. The internet was made to not have a central point of failure, yet what would happen if Google, AWS, and Microsoft all just vanished? Complete chaos would happen over much of the internet and the largest impact would be to western companies.

That makes sense. Can you post close sourced apps on fdroid? If so I can definitely post the app there. I just don't want to make the open source decision rn.

I see. Over here in Europe we use multiple stores too. As for the data collection, I personally don't really care much, I'm not a criminal nor am I an important individual, so they don't really care about me to begin with.

And yea, the internet would be quite fun if they all suddenly died

Oh they absolutely do care, you're exactly who they want the data from. The "average person" is a goldmine for data collection. They profit massively from your existence and you should definitely care at least a little about that.

Eh, I don't see how it affects me as a person. Like, I wouldn't even care if they knew when I took a shit and if they measured it even.

I fail to see how it could affect my life so to say.

That's sad. You should have higher standards man. The world would be much better if we all did.

I just enjoy the easy things lately, Google does make a lot of things easier. I did however remove everything Facebook related

Second this! After everything we've been through with Reddit and Twitter, a lot of users are wary of closed-source/closed-data apps and services. Open source values are what brought us to Lemmy in the first place! An open source app is in keeping with that.

Getting some RiF vibes, and that's such a refreshing feeling in a era of bloated corporate apps.

I like it a lot so far.

Nice progress so far, the UI looks clean and easy to use. Though the name Reader is a little confusing to me - is it only for viewing / reading posts, or will you also be able to create new ones and comment on them?

tl;dr is everything is WIP. The goal is that you will be able to do everything and more that you can from the website within the app. I’ll make a post about the current priority list on https://lemmy.world/c/summit later today.

You might wanna change that developer name.

Love how smooth this is compares to jerboa

This is excellent. I started work on an android app cause it seemed like nobody was doing anything. This is already looking like i should have just been patient.

Its so much nicer to use than jerboa, i just hope its feature par with jerboa soon so i can hop ship

Edit: please also consider uploading to FDroid?

I started work on an android app cause it seemed like nobody was doing anything.

Have you heard about Jerboa?

Using it now. Fair to say its pretty bad

Agreed. Please continue yours friend, if there were 20 good apps right now then that would be one thing, but there are zero.

Posting from the kbin web UI

feels nice, but i can't login to lemmy.world, it always gives me "incorrect password". login via web and jerboa works fine.

Hmm that is odd. All of my test accounds are on the lemmy.world instance but I haven't encountered any issues. I can try looking more into it. Can you double check there is no mispelling with the instance name (lemmy.world) or the user name?

Nice app. Feels a lot better than jerboa already, even if it's just in early access. Have high hopes for this. Keep it up!

Damn mate, this is pretty substantial already. Well done!

Damn, seem like a nice app. Coming from the Baconreader for Reddit app, this feels more familiar than Jerboa. It's also one of the fastest feeling apps on my Nokia 7.2 (which is getting quite slow in some apps). Not feature-rich enough yet to replace Jerboa, but I'm keeping an eye on it nonetheless

I love BaconReader to death, so you've just sold it for me. Gonna go try it.

Keep in mind that it's currently not really finished. It probably can't be your main app (yet)

Yeah, tried it and it's... very rough. Which is understandable, since it's new!

I'm using Jerboa right now, and I'll definitely try the app that the Sync for Reddit developer is making once that comes out. I tried a few Reddit apps too but I liked BaconReader the best, so I'll see what I like most for Lemmy once things settle a bit and the apps aren't so rough around the edges.

Wow, that's really impressive progress in that amount of time! Keep it up, I love what I'm seeing!

Oh yeah, I just found a bug with upvoting :(. I'll try to do a quick release in a bit.

An update with the fix has been submitted to the play store. It should become available in 30 - 60 minutes.

Downloading. Looks very good but features are a bit lacking from what i can tell (no comment/post history?) and saved posts are a wip. Keep up the good work, excited to see updates in the future

tl;dr is everything is WIP. At the moment no feature is "off limits". I'm just trying to crank out as much as I can as fast as I can. I'll make a post about the current priority list on https://lemmy.world/c/summit later today.