Now that 0.19 is in testing on a couple of servers we’re faced with the reality that Liftoff is probably not going to be functional for much longer. So I’m curious what everyone’s got planned.
Personally I’ve got my eye on [email protected] which is currently under development but looks like it might be the closest to my ideal. Developer describes it thusly:
I liked the feature richness of Liftoff (e.g. the possibility to explore all the communities of an external instance), the multi-community feature of Summit and the polished UI of Thunder and I wished I could have them all in the same app.
It’s currently very promising, but also very buggy so I’m hopeful it might be in a more usable state by the time 0.19 starts majorly rolling out. We shall see. The dev put out a call for testers a couple days ago but I’m sure more wouldn’t hurt if anyone wants to give it a whirl.
I’ve tried most of the main Android options by this point, Summit gets the most use just because of multi-communities (great for sports and other happening-right-now events) but I’m really not a fan of its interface.
Boost looks nice and simple, but I find a lot of the features to be just straight-up broken.
Sync and Eternity both put me off with their looks even though they look totally different to each other!
Connect would probably be my second choice so far, but I’d still need to keep Summit around for the multi-communities which is a bit annoying.
That’s about the extent of my investigations at this point. Would love to hear which you’ve tried and what you like / dislike from the point of view of a Liftoff user. Let’s get some recommendations ironed out before everything breaks and this group is overrun with people asking why 😅
I’m assuming these are all for Android only. What about iOS? I’m using Memmy but it’s got some quirks too and I’m still looking for the Apollo experience.
Avelon: reminds me most of Apollo. Paywalls for premium features of course. Mlem: decent and getting better with every update. Arctic: not a fan of the current cluttered compact post view Voyager: stable web-app with frequent updates Liftoff: Had major cache issues in iOS, mine got up to 100GB. Excellent view on another instance support. Memmy: decent, but the design isn’t my favorite.
Voyager is also available as a native app. Note that because of authentication changes in 0.19 no PWA will be able to simultaneously support 0.19 and lower versions. It will require a native app.
I’m iOS as well and Memmy has been not showing the first comment for me so im just using Avelon now
You might want to check out Voyager. It’s for both android and ios
Another vote for Voyager, it’s so close to Apollo that Christian said it looked like he’d contributed to the design.
Thanks, this was enough to get me to try it and within 5 mins I’m uninstalling Memmy. I immediately got Apollo vibes. Thanks!
Have a look at the PWA versions of the online clients if you’re using iOS. I believe the costs to develop on Apple devices may be expensive for developers and so won’t develop a native app for iPhones.