Lemmy mobile apps worth mentioning

Chris Remington@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 136 points –

(Please provide your Lemmy app recommendations in the comments)

There are two apps, in particular, that I am testing.

Mlem (iOS) & memmy (iOS & Android)

Both are plugging away and looking very good.

100

Memmy is developing at a crazy fast rate - it’s leapfrogged Mlem in features and stability already imho.

The only thing they need is a better app icon and I'll be happy hahaha.

The app is SO GOOD but the icon looks like it was poorly cropped from a screenshot. Mlem is obviously going for somewhere between the apollo icon and Ivory icon and it makes the app just feel way more professional from the get-go

Yeah the icon is goofy but I can overlook it for the time being - I’d rather them focus on features and functionality and bring the fun stuff later (which seems to be how they’re approaching this)

Is there a way to see a list of your subscribed communities on Memmy yet? That’s the only feature missing compared to Mlem and Thunder for me.

from the main feed tap the star icon in the top left corner, that should open a list of your subscriptions

It's awesome to see Lemmy getting lots of love, and choice in the mobile app space is great for everyone. But some part of me also kind of wishes that rather than spreading so much development effort out over so many mobile apps, that more developers would jump in and contribute to polishing up the official open source Lemmy mobile app, Jerboa. I can't help but feel that it would be nice to see a focused effort somewhere in bringing that one in particular up to snuff, as a sort of "reference" app. And have a few others floating around out there just for some diversity and testing innovative ideas.

Maybe it's already that way, I don't know. It kind of feels like there's a new Lemmy mobile app announced every couple of days.

My understanding is that Lemmur does not work with current Lemmy instances. Could be wrong. Just my understanding. I did try it but could not figure out how to set it to Beehaw for example. Not sure.

I really like Jerboa. I'm getting a server version vs. app version pop-up at launch and the odd crash when making a comment or saving a post, but I enjoy the UX a lot issues aside. The list view is 🤌

You're seeing that toast about versions since backend version 0.18.0 switched away from using a websockets-based API to a REST API, and the Jerboa client app is (in a not-so-descriptive way) warning you that the backend you are connected to isn't aligned with the app version in terms of what it expects of the backed. This should go away pretty soon as more servers update their backend version and the Jerboa app update hits more devices.

Cool, no prob. Thank you for explaining 👍 will be worth the wait.

I agree, somewhat, with your sentiment. However, the 'best' (I know that's subjective) apps will arise from a number of factors. My gut tells me that volunteer devs will flock to the repositories where people are enjoying themselves the most.

Oh yeah for sure. It's just a matter of time. Out of all of these options, some will just fade away (some already have within weeks of initial release), and some will remain and just continue to get better as the development community continues to get a better picture of where all of the action is, and starts to want to be a part of it.

Developers all have their pet frameworks they want to use. Why contribute to a Kotlin app when I can finally learn Dart and Flutter??

Oh yeah for sure, everyone should work on whatever they want without restriction or obligation to be focusing on what someone else wants. And more often than not a pet project is a way to learn a new language or framework with the goal of self-development. That's a great thing.

It's just a thought I selfishly have sometimes when I see many apps in development for the same platform, I can't help but wonder "if all of this effort were focused across fewer apps, could each of those be better than any of these current ones are individually today?" Of course the number of devs contributing to a project has no direct correlation when it comes to the quality or maturity of the product. That's down to the management, skillset of the devs, etc. I'm well aware of all of that, and the pros and cons of the differences in scenarios.

Just thought I'd share the thought out there. In any case, Lemmy getting all of this attention will no doubt lead to the rise of at least a few solid mobile apps that will stick around and not fizzle out into development neglect within a couple of months.

Currently testing out thunder (Android) and it's pretty sleek, especially for a side/hobby project.

Much prefer it to Jerboa, though it has quite a few less features.

Going to try out Liftoff later.

Edit: Okay, Liftoff is pretty impressive, but some accessibility issues and certain things are finicky.

I'd try memmy, but it looks like I'd have to build it from source for Android (I don't see an APK in their GitHub releases) and I'm far too tired to do that. It'd be great if it hit F-Droid soon.

So far, Jerboa's been the most "feature rich", but some of the bugs are very annoying. Don't want to try anything not FOSS, so Connect is out for me.

Thunder is my upcomer choice and i use both it and jerboa as needed. Omcecthunder gets a thing for telling me what posts i have read at a glance i will most likely use thunder exclusively. Jerboa is good, but the thunder dev has really worked on screen reader accessibility and it shows. He has fixed quite a few of my accessibility bug reports already and the app is top notch

Thunder is good, extremely work in progress but what's there is really confidence inspiring for the future. Next update is already bringing stuff I was wishing for.

Thunder is spectacular and it's still in alpha! Dev seems super nice. I'm still mostly using Jerboa, but Thunder will likely be my daily driver once it hits beta :) it's just so slick!

The swiping is such a great idea, i love it so much!

Ooo, lift off is good too.

I wish one of these had notifications, no idea if that's an API thing tho

It's definitely possible. Memmy just got them on iOS, I think?

Its not out yet, but the Sync for Reddit dev is making Sync For Lemmy, so that should be worth checking out in the future.

https://wefwef.app is actually insane even though it's a PWA. It's really really good

Web based PWAs should not be underestimated in this space. Mastodon has a similarly awesome PWA in elk.

Because of the tech involved they seem to be able to develop faster while giving you pretty good performance.

As lemmy has a hard separation between its backend and front end, it’s be cool to see alterntive front ends become more integrated with the mainline deployment. That is, it’d be nice if in settings I could select from a range of front ends, even ones that are acknowledged as experimental third party front ends without any guarantees.

There's no small card / compact mode though, right? That's the only thing preventing me from using this as my main Lemmy app.

Are you able to sort comments? I can't seem to see the option anywheres

for me, Jerboa is the most complete followed by Lift Off, third is Connect for lemmy.

I also cannot find some of the site features with wefwef.

Just switched from Jerboa to Connect on Android.

How do you collapse comments in Connect for Lemmy?

Tap and hold.

I wish I could change the default actions - many don't make sense to me.

Hold down on a comment to collapse it.

I much prefer the tap to collapse with a nice smooth animation like Jerboa but I can compromise in the meantime.

Hi. Connect dev here. You can now collapse with a click under settings on 1.0.39!

Thank you so much for this change, it was the last thing holding me back from swapping over from Jerboa 🙌

Awesome, I really appreciate the change and all the work you're doing!

Memmy is already great and there are multiple updates each day!

Your relative link needs to be changed from /c/ to /m/

Oh, I wasn't aware. Coming from lemmy, the correct relative link to a kbin instance would be /m/. But since the community lives in a lemmy instance, it is /c/. Apparently coming from kbin you need /m/ in both cases. I added a link for both now, thanks.

Switched from Jerboa to Liftoff and I'm very happy with Liftoff so far. Liftoff feels very similar to the Reddit client Infinity for me. Only thing I don't like is the color scheme. It's confusing to make buttons you can click grey...

My main issue with Liftoff is that I can't save images. That's a huge deal breaker for me

On Android I'm liking Thunder and Connect

My absolute favorite is https://wefwef.app/ . It’s a simple PWA and it feels just as good as a full app and has a better feature set than other clients for iOS.

It’s almost bizarre to me how fully featured and polished wefwef.app is. Really amazing.

Yeah this one is surprisingly good. My only issue, which is a deal breaker, is that I can’t swipe from left edge to right to go back to the posts feed after clicking on a specific post. The back button is at the furthest possible placement from my thumb, so it’s just not that useable.

Guess it was my phone getting buggy at the time. This functions normal :)

Works just fine for me. Which device are you on?

I was using Jerboa. But I switched to Summit just today. It's a lot sleeker. It feels closer to RIF. But it doesn't show a way to save posts/comments.

Also, neither one has a way to search for keywords.

Jerboa actually got another update today which resolved the bug issues I had with the previous update.

No app has come close to the lemmy-ui PWA to be honest in terms of stability and featureset at the moment.

Connect for Lemmy works well for me where Jerboa returns a server error

Jerboa made the minimum supportes instance version 0.18, unfortunately the largest instances are still on 0.17 due to captcha reasons.

Ahh, well that explains it...many thanks for the info

No problem, hopefully 0.18.1 comes out soon as most the instances that haven't upgraded to 0.18 are saying they'll update to that version when it drops.

Just loaded the testflight of Memmy (thanks to your post) and man, loving it so much so far. It perfectly compliments the site, at least for basic browsing (I haven't tried posting anything other than comments).

Don't forget to try Mlem as well...I'm using both and they are very close.

Memmy is incredible and makes using lemmy easy and fun. Cant see myself using any other app going forward. Its perfect.

I tried for way too long tonight to try and build memmy for Android to check it out. Couldn't get it to run unfortunately. I'll probably wait until there is a prebuilt apk to download

Never mind it’s back I guess

Mlem has been discontinued

It hasn’t. The original author decided to back away from the project, and the remaining team members are keeping it going. The original TestFlight got closed, but there’s a new one up now, and changes are progressing.

I'm currently using Liftoff and it is soo much better than Jerboa. It lacks a few features still but jerboa was wayy to buggy for me to use

The webapp on android has been the best for me.

I've been trying out Summit on Android - it's impressively very slick so far.

Well okay I may or may not be trying out all of the ones I've come across (I need a folder for them at this point) but Summit didn't look to be mentioned here, so I figured I'd cast my vote!