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. :)
Eternity is still my favourite Lemmy app on Android. Every other app I tried felt incomplete and I always go back to Eternity.
Can I ask you what are the features you find missing in other apps? What I can think of as Eternity’s distinctive features are:
- unique customization and theming
- navigating through posts with swipe gestures
and that’s it, all the rest seems to be in every app.
An addendum, since it is an open source project and it has a solid user base, how come nobody is helping out with contributions? I am an Android developer and I have some reasons in mind but I would like to have someone else’s opinion before speaking.
I only use open source apps so my choices are more limited. What I like about Eternity:
- It is stable, never experienced a crash
- Separate upvote and downvote counts
- It displays user names and instances on all posts
- Bottom drawer allows one tap access to inbox and profile
- The layout for posts is clean and have good separation between posts
- One-tap collapse / expand comments. Some other apps require tap and hold or swipe gestures.
- NSFW settings
- Notifications that actually work
- General UI design (font, spacing, icons, colours, button locations etc)
There are other apps with some of the features above, but none with all of the above.
Thank you! “Notifications that actually work” killed me lol… I’ll take notes!
To add to that, the transparent navigation bar and immersive mode.
The maintainer has been very welcoming of my patches.
The “downsides” I could enumerate are that the production app doesn’t get released as often as I would like (how entitled!) and, tbh, the code base is a bit messy, having inherited much code debt from the initial Reddit fork.
My opinion was: “it looks a lot like a legacy app even if it is a freshly started project”. Not ideal to attract devs.
EDIT: I maintain a project with a more modern style and nobody is helping me so I guess I have no idea about what attracts other devs! 🤣🤣🤣
What’s the app? I might check it out.
Look at what Lemmy community I’ve been posting recently to figure out. Anyway, if you are on Eternity please keep working on that because they need contributors!
I would really like some ideas on how to improve my own client though, so if you have suggestions tell me and I’ll go through them… I think I’ll have to work on the design, stability, markdown rendering which kinda sucks in my app, background fetch/notifications are not there (I didn’t even try), styling is only partial, etc. etc. so feature parity and reliability are the areas needing improvement…
I just tried your app, and I’m quite impressed!
As for ideas, personally I like being able to see user avatars in the comments, and as you already mentioned in the pros for Eternity: theming. I wish I could edit some of the colors of different types of text, such as the username, title text, and upvote/downvotes to all be different colors. community text, etc.
As it is, the only thing differentiating the different types of text is their size, which I’m betting is fine for most users, but personally that feature is what drew me to Eternity, as it just helps me parse information better.
Good app tho! And cheers for making it open source! :D
Interesting point, I can add colors for different text classes (now only upvotes and downvotes can be configured)… thanks for the idea!
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!
Thanks Bazsalanszky! Love the app!!
Eternity is the best. I will never switch, I love infinity for reddit and this basically turns Lemmy to Reddit for me. I love it.
I heard about Eternity through a Lemmy post.
It is hard to find on Google Play, even knowing the name.
Better SEO might increase numbers?
I agree with everything you said and i think boost is 20$ not 4$ . .EDIT : I am dumb and thought about sync
I made sure to check before making the post.
But that may be a bad point of comparison, since Boost is supported by ads, so they can afford to make the premium version cheap. Whereas Eternity has always been ad-free, yet doesn’t seem to have received all that many donations. :(
My bad i thought about sync srry
No worries dude! ^^
