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 ๐
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 Will have to check out the changes since my knowledge is clearly out of date, cheers.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know anything about the development, I just use it ๐คทโโ๏ธ 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.
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.
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
I switched to Thunder. Itโs not perfect (search could use some work).
It doesnโt reload my main feed everytime I return after looking at an article, and lets me hid posts Iโve โreadโ. ยฏ_(ใ)_/ยฏ. It supports amoled black themes, swipe gestures and is reasonably unobtrusive.
Also, itโs cross platform for iOS and android, and I switch back and forth on a daily basis.
Iโm assuming these are all for Android only. What about iOS? Iโm using Memmy but itโs got some quirks too and Iโm 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 isnโt 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.
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.
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!
It looks like v0.19 has been released, so over the next days instances will update. So unless thereโs a sudden new compatible version, weโre at the end of Liftoff!
Just to add that when an instance upgrades to v0.19 all logins are invalidated. So youโll need to log back in. So it would be good to choose your new app before that happens.
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?
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.