I have noticed some posts here lamenting Eternity falling behind in development, the last substantial release 5 months old.

However, the last post by the developer was last month, so I do not believe it has been abandoned, I think they just got busy with other things, and will hopefully return someday when they have the time.

But I think it appropriate to emphasize that Eternity is open-source software, given to us for free and out of good will of the developer, Bazsalanszky. I think now would be a good time to show him our appreciation for the work he did in gifting us with one of the finest apps on the lemmyverse, and to return his goodwill.

If you have the means, the developer has a librapay account where you can donate a small sum of your choosing. As a point of comparison, Boost for Lemmy (a closed source app with trackers) charges $3.99 to remove ads (Eternity has never had ads).

If you don’t have the means to donate, I’m sure Bazsalanszky would appreciate a kind message instead. :)

  • tinsukEEnglish
    28•9 months ago

    I keep using Eternity and even contributed some patches to it because it is Open Source and Android native, which might sound like a low bar, but really:

    Open Source

    • It’s free
    • I’m not the product. Really, even if some closed source alternatives have relatively cheap Ad and tracking free experiences, you’ll always be seen as the source of monetization. And I’m too weary of having paid for a good app only to see it try to twist my arm and squeeze more money or sell out to a big corp.
    • I can fix what’s broken. If I find an issue with an otherwise unimportant part of the app, but that matters to me, I don’t need to wait and pray it doesn’t get forgotten. I can fix it myself and end up helping the devs and whole user base in the process.

    Android native

    • It shows. I use a 5 year old phone that still kicks ass. But the otherwise good cross platform alternatives out there make the user experience more jittery than is excusable. Even PWAs (Web Apps) are snappier than those!
    • It is not a Flutter ListView powered timeline. Trust me, I’m lazy, and if cross platform frameworks were up to the task, I’d be among the first to endorse them. But they aren’t. Have you noticed that the timeline tends to “jump around” if you’re scrolling around on other apps? Yeah, the Android RecyclerView that Eternity uses doesn’t have that (apparently unfixable) problem.

    Thanks Bazsalanszky!