For me it would be:
- Monet icon and Material UI design.
- Mark read post while scrolling.
- A button to hide such read posts.
I know there are more critical functions which most of the apps are lacking like going straight to the comment from a reply, it wasn’t a big deal before because there were not many comments, but now it is becoming harder to find the context!
So far only Jerboa and Thunder qualifies the first “needs” for me!
Please share yours!
What’s a Monet icon and what’s good about it?
I personally like how it looks like, the icons get a monochromatic theme based on the color of your wallpaper.
Here is home my home screen looks like.
Ah, so it’s a design standard that gives you a consistent look if you’re using a launcher that doesn’t support custom icon packs?
Well, I guess this is spot on since Pixel Launcher does not support icon packs.
Gotcha. I’ve been using third party launchers and custom icons for years, so I’ve never had to worry about it.
Yeah I can see the appeal of that, but I like the smoothness of the Pixel Launchers above everything else and having these colour themed icons (based on the wallpaper) is a nice gesture from the devs.
Swipe navigation, I’m coming from relay for Reddit, and using a left swipe to go back was really handy.
I keep trying it in jerboa and thunder … So a lot of unintentional upvotes in thunder and nothing happens in jerboa.
Next is embedded imgur/redgifs opening, which I was also accustomed to.
So far the app Lemming seems to be doing swipe gestures really well. I’m just waiting for a settings page and a proper light theme and I’ll probably move to it. For now, I’m using wefwef.app, which behaves very similar to apollo and also has great gesture support. I highly recommend both.
Lemming looks gorgeous I’m also expecting more QOL updates!
The LiftOff app has swipe navigation
The latest jerboa does too, which I dig completely!
I think Lemming and Thunder are the ones that handle swiping features the best for now.
Might be controversial, but I personally want the option to turn off swipe gestures for votes. I keep giving people downvotes on accident when I’m trying to go back to the previous screen. Every iOS app I’ve tried has this feature and it’s inconvenient imo.
- Stability (no random 502s, go away with refresh - sounds like backend trouble?)
- Performance/efficiency
- Viewing all communities in an instance
- Open in app (YouTube, Play Store, etc)
Came from RIF and currently using Liftoff, it’s my favorite client so far!
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Allow you to set helper apps in Android to open specific links - i.e revanced instead of YouTube, Firefox instead of Chrome, imgurviewer instead of various image sites in a browser. Ads and bloat designed to drive engagement on mobile are frustrating.
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Client-side blacklists for communities and instances so they aren’t shown in all
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#1 again
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-Community aggregation (multi-communities) -Easy back and forth nav between the post scroll and threads -occasional random substitution of a sports game score/summary instead of the thread I clicked to read.
Ok, not that last one, but I couldn’t think of a good third one off the top of my head.
- Uses RIF for inspiration.
- Great battery life + interplay with android ecosystem
- Information density
- Customizability without being overwhelming
- Works well with larger Lemmy, Threadiverse, & Fediverse communities
- Upstream major improvements up to base Lemmy + ActivityPub platforms. Ideally there’d be some cooperation between open source apps to reuse existing tools and extract shared functionality to new libraries for further reuse, especially in terms of Lemmy API consumption, security, android/ios/etc platform quirks, emojis, etc.
- Multiple accounts / platform access
- Allow workflows to share between platforms. Kbin combining micro+forums is neat, but I think separating microblogging and link aggregation/forums makes more sense. It’d be neat to share things that I like find as microblogging posts. Vice versa sometimes I think masto posts would be great discussion items for communities and woudl like to create a post from there.
- Open source
- I know RIF wasn’t, but ideally there’d at least be an open core (which fits in with my first point under #2)
- Cooperates with other open platforms, preferably using web + other free standards where appropriate to make contributions easier.
- If fully open, eventually backed/incorporated by larger FOSS players like Mozilla Foundation, Apache, or FSF.
I never used RIF, not that I remember though.
Only used Relay, Boost and Sync for Reddit, do you know if it was very different to those?
I only briefly tried other apps. RIF was older (and hardened, so super performant + stable), and kept the information density high (less whitespace) similar to old.reddit. Lots of internal integrations with other sites so my reddit browsing didn’t affect my feeds on other sites (particularly YouTube). https://www.androidpolice.com/best-reddit-apps/ has a good comparison of the main apps.
Oh I see, sadly most of those apps are gonna die, devs deserved better.
Clear posts that I’ve already read, but be able to see them again with refresh. Not completely gone like with the settings option. This is what I miss the most of my old Reddit client.
Sorting, if I sort by new it’s really really similar to hot right now, just one article or two different. In fact I get hot articles that are 8 mins old, something isn’t right.
Link/image handleing is hit and miss right now, sometimes they don’t expand when I “click” on them.
Huh 8 min isn’t hot enough? I think it was haha.
And yeah that clean read behavior is what I used to have on Sync for Reddit, the first app that gets this will have my total attention.
The current setting to hide read posts is too powerful, it really hides everything, even your own posts in your profile view
A button at the bottom right of the screen to skip to the next top-level comment.
- Swipe to upvote/downvote/save
- Hide read posts
- MultiCommunities (MultiReddits)
- Open YT links in app (to skip ads)
- Add / Tag Favorite Communities for quicker access
Open video inapp would be so nice.
Pressing and holding to see a larger view of media. aka Peeking.
Apollo and Sync for Reddit had this!
I’m using my tablet to browse Lemmy and haven’t found an app yet that has all the posts on the left side and the content of a single post on the right.
The screenshot shows an example.
Also, mark a post as read when you have opened the media and ability to hide read posts.
- User-level ignore: Post, Person, Community, Instance.
- Syncing of settings & data across devices.
- A nice ham sandwich.
- Ability to log in to accounts on multiple instances This one is common, but I’m specifying it for #2 & #3.
- Optional sync community subscriptions between accounts I’m too locked-in to an instance after subscribing to many communities. Make it easy for me to migrate by keeping my subscriptions in sync between accounts.
- Optional publish alt account links to Bio To make migration easier, if I’m syncing subscriptions between my @[email protected] account and my @[email protected] accounts, then modify my @[email protected] Bio to say “aka @[email protected]” and vice-versa.
- Shared inbox for all accounts If I get a fourth then this would be it.
The only thing that I find truly lacking in all clients at this point is a practical solution to viewing external communities by the multiple link methods in your own instance, to properly wait for the community to download if required, and to allow you to subscribe. The web frontend is the best at this but even with searching it outputs a result before the community pops up, likely because it’s not downloaded yet, but it should make the search take longer and wait for it to download.
