EDIT: I’ve created a community for the Lemon app: [email protected] !
Hello community! 👋
I wanted to drop a short announcement: I’m building an iOS client for lemmy, named Lemon 🍋!
It is still very much in early development, only having one week of dev time so far. I’m not yet ready for users (unless you want a lot of bugs 😅).
I’ll be sharing some development logs throughout the journey. Consider this the first of (hopefully many) entries!
Story time:
For years, I was an avid user of Apollo for Reddit. I was an “ultra subscriber” and occasional donor, since I loved the app and Christian Selig was such a kind and engaged developer. He managed to build both an inspiring app and community.
I was heartbroken when I learned Apollo would shut down due to Reddit’s API changes.
Lemon for Lemmy as an homage to Apollo and is greatly inspired by his amazing work (Thank you, Christian!)
Features
Some of the currently-working features are:
- 🔒 Logging in and registering (including instance search + information browsing such as user count, location, accepting memberships, etc!)
- 💡 Light and Dark modes
- 🔼 Upvoting / downvoting posts with optimistic updates and rollbacks (including swipe to vote!)
- 🚀 highly performant feed with infinite scroll
- 📚 persistent cache to read while you’re offline
My goal is to make this a fully featured Lemmy client for iOS, and hopefully one day as good as Apollo is/was!
That’s all for now. Here’s some screenshots. Until next time!
Very awesome! I’m excited to hear more fellow developers are creating more tools to browse Lemmy! Persistent cache seems really interesting! Excited for the future!
It’s been very exciting watching all the new Lemmy developments these past few months. Really the energy made me want to start this project. I hope to see the Lemmy platform flourish with many great options! 🙌
I’m an Android user but this looks good!
As a new user, the main issue I had was not being able to find instances across communities, and it took me way too lok to realise I had to switch from “local” to “all”. If there’s some way to make new users aware of that, it’ll help new users find content and keep them engaged!
Thank you! Android might come one day, but likely not until iOS is stable :)
And I totally agree - I had similar issues when I was first starting out. One thing I hope is for Lemon to be easy, simple and intuitive to new users or less technical users. I want Lemmy to feel as fun and easy to use as Reddit is/was, but with all the benefits of a federated platform!
Good luck!
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As a relatively new user myself, I definitely know the feeling. I hope to make an inviting experience for new users!
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It looks just like Apollo! That’s awesome. Will there be an iPad version as well?
Deff wanna see more!
Happy to hear! I’ll be sharing updates along the way here in [email protected] so stay tuned for more! ❤️
Looks good!
Thank you!
Cheers, looks incredible! Keep us posted and when/if you have a TestFlight link I know we’d all be happy to test it out and give feedback
Thank you! I’ll post a new thread in [email protected] when I’m ready to bring on some testers! Hopefully in the next 1-2 weeks, free-time permitting!
Glad to see another app! Can you talk about what you’ll be doing that’s different than mlem and memmy? I’ve tried them both (writing this on mlem) and have enjoyed both. Memmy feels closer to the Apollo experience I’m missing so far.
I’m not very familiar with Mlem or Memmy (both look like fantastic projects!) - so I can’t speak to specific feature differences yet. To be totally honest, I’m still figuring out my feature roadmap anyway! :) In the future, I’d love to do a comparison post.
I will say that something I personally care about a lot is the user experience. I’m a frontend engineer by trade, so the visual fidelity, ease of use and overall onboarding experience for new users are things I think about a lot. Especially in this federated world, where many potential users aren’t familiar with the concepts.
I’m hoping to make Lemon intuitive, fun and easy to use for the average non-technical person, while still enabling “power user” functionality for those who need it.
I would check both of those out. I like both. MLem feels a lot more polished but is missing a few key features. Memmy is clearly going for the Apollo vibe but is missing some polish. Maybe it would make sense to try to join forces with one (or both) of them?
Not that I mind having more apps to try out, but if you are really trying to go for an Apollo clone you have some competition already.
Thanks for the info! I will check both out :)
No problem! I definitely think there is room for more apps, but I’m not sure if there is a need for more Apollo-inspired apps, if you know what I mean. Or if you really want to follow the Apollo route, I am not aware of any Kbin apps yet and I understand it has a totally different backend.
That’s some great feedback, much appreciated! I’ve had a few requests for kbin support already, that may be something I explore once the Lemmy implementation is stable. :)
Great to see! More development around lemmy is always a good thing.
Damn nice! Subscribed! Happy to test!
Will there be a TestFlight to try out?
Will this have an iPad version? Hopefully with a sidebar haha. And if so, will you bring it to macOS through catalyst?
It would be also helpful if you could create a separate community for the app.
Yes! Great call out. This was on my todos but slipped through the cracks.
I’ve just created [email protected] which will be our home base.
Count me in!
