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.
I think Connect looks nicer so I’ve been using it - very excited for Sync for Lemmy though
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?
Thanks for linking these interesting projects.
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!
I am missing the comment collapse option on all apps except gerboa. Hope they fix it.
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!
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.
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
I’m seriously missing the ability to jump to the current/next/previous parent comment. I make heavy use of that and only Jerboa has it right now, I think.
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! 👀
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.
That is a very good point. I just found it by accident a few minutes ago and didn’t even realize that.
Interesting, I’m waiting for Sync for Lemmy, is this one open source?
No, I dont think it is unfortunately. Another commenter said it was full of trackers, although I have not verified that. I didn’t realize that when I made the post
Where is this post? I tried connect and it works fine, the guy made it in a week, it’s impressive
Here is the post: https://beehaw.org/comment/449643
I cannot verify if that comment is true or not, or how they found out the information.
I tried to reply and ask, but for some reason my comment will not post! I have tried using the website and several Lemmy apps.
deleted by creator
Thanks. I wonder where that other commenter got their info.
That comment seems to be an attempt at disinformation. I have not detected any of those trackers. You should also run your own checks just to be sure.
If I had to take a guess: he’s opening posts that use the internal browser, and sites he’s browsing are the ones i initiating those connections. The app opening the webview doesn’t have much in the way to prevent that.
Don’t open external links if you don’t know what that entails.
Connect dev here, we use 0 trackers of any kind beyond what the Play store tracks by default.
That screenshot is from the DuckDuckGo app when set up to blocking trackers, that means that while it was running it tried to connect to known tracker addresses and the DDG app stopped it and logged the attempts.
We would need somebody else that uses DDG as blocker too to install this app and run it for a bit and see if they can replicate this result
Same for me, strange
If I had to take a guess: he’s opening posts that use the internal browser, and sites he’s browsing are the ones i initiating those connections. The app opening the webview doesn’t have much in the way to prevent that.
Don’t open external links if you don’t know what that entails.
I think this is the answer.
I’m glad to see apps being made for Lemmy, but being open source for me is a must.
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)
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.
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. You can also try the IzzyOnDroid repository on F-droid.
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.
Jerboa has been crashing on me lately so I’ve been using Connect while it gets fixed. No complaints so far.
Have you tried thunder? Super slick UI, if minimalism is your thing, but also WIP.
Wow, this is actually awesome. I’ve been using Jerboa for a couple of weeks now, but Thunder feels much more inline with what a was hoping for. Good lookin out man.
Edit: precompiled APK download link so I don’t have to do it myself is very appreciated.
Oh wow I haven’t heard of this! Just downloaded it.
Very nice, it has the swipe like funcion.
Looks super nice, but won’t let me log in to my instance.
Darn. I had to give it a second try but its working now for me.
Thunder is hot! It is making me want to actually try developing in Flutter, which seems to be the “new hotness.”
Oh wow, this one’s awesome. Thanks!
Same here, Jerboa won’t even open on my phone without crashing. :/ Connect for Lemmy has all the basic functionality down, so it’s okay to use.
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.
The community for the app:
I’m also happily using it, it’s the only app which works on my old phone, haha :D
Same. I prefer it to Jerboa. But I am disquieted by the currently unverified post stating that it might be full of trackers.
Tested Connect using three different privacy apps and none of them found any trackers. I don’t know if I can trust the source of that post. Instead of blindly taking my word for it you should also conduct your own tests.
you might want to re-evaluate how you are scanning for trackers. I am running duck duck go’s app tracking protection on Android and this is it’s summary of connect for lemmy from the past 22 hours.
1175 tracking attempts blocked from 40 different companies(trackers)
That is concerning. Connect is not open-source I guess?
I think this comes down to the difference in how you and I secure our phones. I get no tracker pings on any of my apps. Not even with that DuckDuckGo app running for an hour.
Based on your sample results, Connect isn’t the problem. Your phone seems to be horribly compromised.
Thanks for the heads up. A shame since it looks decent. But I think I’ll pass now.
The developer himself responded further down the comment and said there are no trackers, and the Aurora store verifies that - it scans the app source and also found zero trackers.
Most likely the trackers the commenter was referring to were from browsing many external websites from within the app itself like when clicking links.
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.
The entire UI got a refresh. There’s an actual search button now too.
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.
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 tried Connect and didn’t like its UI. The PWA isn’t very useful as the feed reloads from the top when I back out of a post by swiping from the edge.
Yeah still super buggy for sure. When you swap users, you have to force close the app and reopen for it to actually swap properly.
Jerboa has been worse for me since the update. It won’t follow my feed or sorting selections.
Didn’t notice anything different. In fact, I can’t change to “All” anymore (coincidence?). That’s why I’m exploring Connect right now.
All is definitely still there. Not sure the issue on your side.
Literally here on connect from Jerboa because today’s update has caused it to stop sorting anything, at all. The only view it will give me is Local by Hot, no matter how many times I try to change to Subscribed or All.
Tbh, Connect isn’t vibing with me yet eithet, but I’ll play with the settings before I decide it’s not right for me.
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.
