11 mo. ago • 95%

So, which app are we all moving to?

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 !raccoonforlemmy@lemmy.world 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 😅

64 comments

I’m using voyager. And happy with it. Just wanted to at it to the list

37
- Same just miss being able to sort posts
  
  Edit: you can now sort posts
  
  0
I'm currently using Jerboa. It's become much better since its launch.

20
- Oh interesting, last time I did a proper trawl was when everything was on fire and the devs were almost begging people to stop using Jerboa so they could concentrate on Lemmy core. Will have to check out the changes since my knowledge is clearly out of date, cheers.
  
  5
- Does it actually support 0.19 now? It still had login issues last I checked, two days ago
  
  2
  
  No idea, my instance is still on 0.18. But judging by the last commit 0.19 support is only partially done.
  
  0
I really love Boost and haven't noticed broken features. It was a Reddit client before, so it's already really polished and offers, in my experience, a great UX.

The only downside I see is that it isn't open source, but I don't care for now.

I also used Voyager for a while and it's really good too.

19
- Boost has been very good for me. Missing a few features (mostly moderator stuff) but it works well for normal use.
  
  5
- Maybe it's something wrong with my account. For example I'm logged in, I go to browse All or Local, and bam! Full of communities I already have blocked. And trying to block them again through Boost itself seems to do nothing either. It's weird.
  
  3
  
  I think this is a side effect of the 0.19 release. I could reproduce your issue with an account on a 0.19 instance, but not on 0.18.5. This will probably get fixed after some time.
  
  5
I switched to Sync a while back cause Liftoff just wasn't working the way I wanted it to and have been pretty happy with it. The layout is pretty customizable so it might be worth giving it another chance and seeing if you can play around with it enough to get it where you like.

14
- Yeah I fiddled with it a fair bit when it first came out, there's nothing hugely wrong with it it just doesn't "feel" right, you know? I think given that I was a RiF and then Liftoff user, maybe my brain craves a bit of jank lol
  
  6
I switched to Connect months ago solely for the ability to manually hide posts.

14
- Connect is great
  
  6
- I love connect! Glad the dev started updating again recently
  
  6
- Yeah I definitely like it visually a lot more than most others too. Do you know if they're looking at adding multi-community type features?
  
  2
  
  I don't know anything about the development, I just use it 🤷‍♀️ I imagine they probably have their own community you could ask. I'm still just scrolling though all with a good 1200+ communities blocked and every US politician's name I could think of added to the title filters.
  
  4
- I can't get comments to post using Connect. It keeps saying I'm not logged in, even though I am.
  
  1
I'm out of the loop. What's going on with Liftoff?

11
- Short version, as far as we can tell it's not being actively maintained at the moment, and the soon-to-drop new Lemmy version is going to break it.
  
  22
  
  Oy. Ok. Thanks.
  
  5
Memmy and Voyager both are closest to Apollo for me.

11
- Check out Lemma too. Pretty good so far and progress is being made. It also has the best app icon of any of them.
  
  5
Thunder is my new favorite.

10
I switched to Thunder. It’s not perfect (search could use some work).

It doesn’t reload my main feed everytime I return after looking at an article, and lets me hid posts I’ve ‘read’. ¯_(ツ)_/¯. It supports amoled black themes, swipe gestures and is reasonably unobtrusive.

Also, it’s cross platform for iOS and android, and I switch back and forth on a daily basis.

9
- Thunder has been decent in my experience as well. I just wish the icon was nicer... Not even sure what it's supposed to be? An S? No idea
  
  2
  
  It could possibly be a lightning bolt?
  
  7
Eternity is so far the second best app I've found, after Liftoff ofc

8
I've mostly been using Voyager, but Eternity and Thunder are pretty good too. Just try them all and pick your favorite.

8
- Just installed Eternity. Infinity was my go to app for reddit so I'm pretty pleased at the moment!
  
  7
Eternity is the best Lemmy app for me.

7
- I think I'll also settle for eternity. It does feel different than liftoff and rif but not impossible to get used to.
  
  2
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.

5
- 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.
  
  5
  
  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.
  
  2
- I’m iOS as well and Memmy has been not showing the first comment for me so im just using Avelon now
  
  4
- You might want to check out Voyager. It's for both android and ios
  
  4
  
  Another vote for Voyager, it’s so close to Apollo that Christian said it looked like he’d contributed to the design.
  
  2
- 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.
  
  -2
Liftoff was the closest thing I could find to reddit is fun, in terms of muscle memory, hopefully I find a replacement

5
- I'm from RIF, I use Voyager with compact mode and disabled gestures. It's exactly what I was looking for
  
  6
  
  Voyager was a bit jank last time I used it, I'll give it another go
  
  1
- That's why I picked it too. Hoping Raccoon can fill the gap with a bit more development time 🤞
  
  2
It looks like v0.19 has been released, so over the next days instances will update. So unless there’s a sudden new compatible version, we’re at the end of Liftoff!

4
- Just to add that when an instance upgrades to v0.19 all logins are invalidated. So you’ll need to log back in. So it would be good to choose your new app before that happens.
  
  2
This is just sad tbh, I wish we didn't have to give up. But once lemmy.world upgrades, won't have a choice.

Jumped here from voyager when it first came out, too buggy for my liking.

4
- It is disappointing. But at least we have a lot of options!
  
  Was kind of hoping people might reply to this thread with more actual reasoning for their faves, from the pov of us all enjoying Liftoff and wanting to find the next best thing. But it's pretty much just turned into a list of all the apps, whoops!
  
  5
  
  Well, I'm typing this on voyager now, original comment was liftoff.
  
  Feels different, it works but somehow it feels more sluggish in terms of processing network requests.
  
  Dunno man, liftoff just felt lean and mean. I'll definitely switch back once it gets developed again.
  
  4
I'll probably go back to Connect which is what I was using like a few days before Liftoff. They're extremely similar, but I just preferred Liftoff's UI.

I would have possibly gone with Boost; but I'd rather not have ads and since there are plenty of free, adless alternatives I'm not paying for ad-free Boost.

3
Currently have six apps installed and periodically jump between them. But for some time now I have unexpectly found myself mostly using Voyager. I just love poking the eyeball?

3
- I'm currently up to 11, might be developing a problem lol
  
  2
Eternity felt right to me

3
Interestingly, Lemmy World has stayed on 0.18.5 (for the moment) which might give Liftoff! a little longer to update.

3
BOOST FOR LEMMY every day

2
- Doesn't boost have ads?
  
  2
  
  Pay for good code
  
  -1
Thunder! It’s amazing and has exactly the functionality I need 🙃

2
Infinity is pretty good

2
Will probably just use web ui

1
I’m using Avelon. It’s really nice but needs a paid subscription to unlock all the cool features. Still worth it imo.

0
- Unfortunately it has some bugs that cause respring and even a reboot (never seen an iOS app do that before)
  
  1
  
  I haven’t had a reboot but I’ve seen it crash on launch quite a few times.
  
  2

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