Does anyone else use the android app Connect for Lemmy? It reminds me of Infinity for Reddit. If you use it, do you like it better than Jerboa? I also found another new Lemmy app called Liftoff.
Connect for Lemmy: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kuroneko.lemmy_connect
Anyone else just using whatever is FOSS feom f-droid?
Of course the more apps the merrier, but personally open code = a more trustworthy use for me
Jerboa was the first showing up on F-Droid and so far it’s great: minimalistic, responsive, lightweight (only 2MB or so). Don’t know why so many people are developing apps and not simply joining efforts. Makes me think they’re doing it for the purpose of doing it, and because they’re happy to work on an app and get their software engineering brain occupied by their own little project. But what will happen once this sentiment passes? Who’s gonna maintain these apps? What we need is one robust app everyone is working on together.
I say let them be, there are (or soon were) many different third-party apps for Reddit as well and each has their own niche of users for whom it works just right. Jerboa has plenty of devs working on it, and if in doubt I’ll always prefer having a choice between different apps. Let the free FOSS market decide!
The UI of this app honestly makes be feel a bit braindead at times, the process of finding the drop down necessary to even log in made be feel like I unlocked an easter egg in a point and click adventure game. It could use some more thought considering the backend of it is otherwise very well put together.
haha upvoting because your rant made me laugh
All the apps except connect are open source. I’ve tried jeroba, thunder and liftoff so far and liftoff has been the most robust.
Liftoff is great, has a lot of potential too. Devs in their Matrix room are cool.
Yeah. I love the fact that it can aggregate feeds from multiple accounts. It is also the client that has been giving the least amount of timeouts for me.
Same here, installed what was available in F-Droid.
Will check again in a few months, as I assume different flavors will be created.
Looks cool but if it’s not on F-Droid I ain’t using it.
A man/woman of principles
Is your phone 100% un-Googled?
I tried it and didn’t think it was much different from any other Lemmy app right now. Seems like they are only trying to differentiate with visuals at the moment.
Some things I would like to see in future apps and versions of existing apps.
- Integration of the Lemmy community browser or something similar. Basic search takes too long and you need to know what your looking for
- Ability to view top communities posts from the community browser in a separate view alongside “local” and “All” and “subscribed” and could even stand in as a user’s subscribed view before they have customized it to their own liking
- Ability to “force pull” comments and posts from a particular remote community. Or at least compare the number of comments a post has locally to the number it has on its remote instance and present some kind of indicator if they differ.
These are all great suggestions. Is there an official place different app developers could look for these types of feature requests? That would be nice.
I feel like they should be looking here if they want to make an app that the community will appreciate.they should spend some time talking to people in the technology subs and maybe even do some polls.
Connect dev here! I’m watching this thread! 👀
Using Connect because Jerboa just kept crashing on me at startup. Never got to test it out. Problems do exist in Connect, as e.g. I could not comment on this post in the app. Will check out Thunder and Lift off as well, so thanks for the suggestions!
Edit: I literally just found out that you have to hit the huge plus-button at the bottom right to add a comment… I always thought it was for creating a new post 🤦♂️
Good feedback! I’ll change the plus icon to something more obvious in the next release.
Any comment re:tracking that others have raised ITT and any plans to open the source code? Loving the UI thus far but like others here would very much prefer FOSS applications
Connect has 0 trackers of any kind and I collect no information beyond what Google Play Store collects by default. When you open up a webpage with the in-app viewer that webpage may run it’s own trackers but I don’t capture any of that data.
https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.kuroneko.lemmy_connect/latest/
I was also having the Jerboa startup crashes starting yesterday. Version 0.0.35 fixed it for me (it’s not on vanilla F-Droid yet but it is on the IzzyOnDroid repo)
Just tried and it’s much more impressive than Jerboa. No laggy scrolling, UI and UX are nicer. Feels more like RiF.
Only (minor) nitpicks I have are:
dark theme could be darker- I’d prefer the comment form shows as a popup/overlay (like RiF does) so you can kind of glance at the context while commenting
- list view items need more padding and less margin
Jerboa is absolutely not laggy on my side. Find it super responsive and lightweight instead. it’s only 2MB
I’m guessing what they’re referring to is that it waits to fetch the next page of the timeline until relatively “late”. There’s a definite hitch in scrolling for me when it’s fetching more posts.
That said, I’m perfectly satisfied with Jerboa.
true, i do have that same hitch that you describe when it’s fetching more posts. but that’s not too big of an issue for me either. i guess adding a bit of pre-fetching would solve it.
Probably depends on your connection and how fast your instance is
Hmm, I don’t know then. The scrolling is anything but smooth for me.
dark theme could be darker
Try the “Amoled” theme in the settings (remember to click save at the bottom of the page, I initially missed that). It’s a much darker theme on my phone.
Ah! That’s perfect, thanks!
Using it to make this answer, and loving it Jerboa just keeps crashing instantly for me (android 12, Fairphone 4). Not sure why. But connect has just worked out of the box.
Mine has been crashing ever since the recent update specifically when I try to switch my filter from hot to new it seems to only happen if you do it right as you open the app
Jerboa works just fine for me. I’m also on a Fairphone 4, but running CalyxOS with Android 13. Maybe you can try Jerboa from another source like F-droid instead of Google Play or vice versa.
My jerboa was crashing so I tried to install it from Fdroid, and now I can’t sign into either version. (Server isn’t updated because of captcha issues with new update. Jerboa is preventing login because of this.)
So that prevented me from using jerboa.
Connect works still, shame jerboa is having issues.
The F-Droid version is now updated. Give it a shot.
I wish. I’ve updated it from both F droid and the play store and both say my instance version isnt on the current update so I can’t sign in at all.
My instance isn’t updated because the new update is fucky with captchas idk the fine details
These kind of growing pains certainly suck. I hope it settles down for you soon.
This app looks really good. It looks almost exactly how I have my kbin account set up with scripts in a browser, and the gestures are very nice. - I hope it adds kbin support or one of the kbin apps ends up looking like this or better.
Feels and looks good for my instance ‘lemmy.fmhy.ml’ on the web mode. Gestures and actions come second nature almost like, I like it.
Connect seems cool, but I was using Infinity because it was open source. This one doesn’t seem open source (correct me if I’m wrong) so I’ll stick with Liftoff or Jerboa for now
Thanks for the recommendation of Liftoff! I really didn’t like Jerboa but liftoff seems like a nice app.
The lack of picture downloading got me fucked up lol. I’m interested to see jerbora development and liftoff. Will almost certainly jump ship to sync if its anywhere near the quality of the reddit version
Yeah, just discovered that, woof.
Upvoting this post from Connect for Lemmy. Actually I think I still prefer Jerboa. Unfortunately it has stopped working since I updated my instance to 0.18 so this will have to do for now.
Yeah I prefer the look and feel of Jerboa. It’s working fine for me now but I have experienced some glitches in the past.
Exactly the same error I received as well, which led me to find Connect
I am missing the comment collapse option on all apps except gerboa. Hope they fix it.
Thunder has been the most featured for me so far. It does collapse by time, and i am also able to subscribe to communities from new instances following the !community@instance.tld formatting.
Check out liftoff too
I saw the announcement for that one, but I figured I’d leave off testing more for a little bit they mostly seem to be behind jerboa. Does liftoff support subscribing from instances your instance hasn’t seen before already?
It has been the most polished experience so far for me, probably because they had the lemmur code base to begin with. As for adding communities, I’m not sure. The community search works like in Jerboa but I haven’t tried it with new communities not indexed yet.
Just tried it out, but couldn’t login since they don’t have 2FA support yet. I don’t think any of them really do yet, but if you logged in before setting it up the current apps still work. They got a PR for it so I guess I’ll wait till that merges to try it out.
It’s there with a long press. I missed it too at first.
Thank you so much!! This has been driving me crazy. idk why “long press” just never occurs to me as an option!
on Jerboa it was long press but they fixed it in recent releases. now just press once on the comment and it collapses. i was missing that but now the UX is great
Liftoff has it. Press and hold
Using it right now, and I’m enjoying it so far. I was using jerboa before, but it crashed everytime I clicked on a link for a post or community on another instance, and when I tried to add this account (on programming.dev instance) it would crash instantly.
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I’ve yet to find an app as good as just using the browser
You might like this then, a userscript I made, works on Firefox Android (or probably anything that supports installing userscripts) https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-link-switcher
Worth noting that the Jerboa app pushed a major update today and it’s massively improved. Definitely suggest giving it another try after today, it feels like an entirely new app.
I’ll be honest, don’t notice many changes? Feels and looks the same to me.
Where did you download it? From what Ive heard the Play Store version lags behind a bit. I got it via f-droid and now have buttons to jump between top level comments (this isnt the only change but it is the most obvious on first glance). A lot of instances arent on the newest version of lemmy yet though, since the sign up captchas were temporarily removed and preventing bots to sign up is way harder without it. I dont know if there will be software conflicts due to this mismatch though.
Didn’t notice anything different. In fact, I can’t change to “All” anymore (coincidence?). That’s why I’m exploring Connect right now.
Jerboa won’t even let me log in, says server is too outdated :(
There were big api change with lemmy 0.18 which the updated jerboa is compatible with. The instance you were trying to log into is outdated.
Jerboa has been worse for me since the update. It won’t follow my feed or sorting selections.
Jerboa has been very buggy for me the last few days: account switching doesn’t work, jerboa ignores my settings for what feeds to load at default, randomly losing my accounts and crashing.
I think Connect looks nicer so I’ve been using it - very excited for Sync for Lemmy though
