this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023

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Avelon for Lemmy is now on the App Store! (apps.apple.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4709002

Hi everyone!

It's been quite the journey, but Avelon is finally on the App Store!

Click here to download!

The app is includes a lot of awesome features requested by the community, including:

Sleek design that fits right in on iOS & iPadOS
Highly customizable look & behavior
Mark read on scroll & hide read posts
Customizable swipe gestures
Multiple account support
Smart link previews in posts and comments
Support for videos, gifs, photos & other media
Custom font support
Write replies with markdown highlighting
Privacy focused - the app has no tracking of any kind
Gallery mode + hide bars on scroll = full immersion ... and a lot more!

Screenshots

Here's some cool app store screenshots of the app:

Developing this app has been one of the best development experiences I've had, and I feel very privileged and happy to have been able to contribute to Lemmy in this way. Nothing is more motivating than seeing so many people already enjoying the app and providing suggestions and feedback.

I really hope you enjoy Avelon, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about what everyone thinks. Keep the feedback coming!

Thank you, Sigve Rokenes

all 45 comments

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Looks like the best client so far! Replacing Voyager with this, thank you for this amazing app!

Edit: is it possible to view the instance name in the community name when scrolling down the feed? That seems like the only feature I’m missing from Voyager… (e.g. [email protected] instead of just linux)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Coming in the next version! For both communities & users

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes I am missing this too. How about also the option to see the instance that the poster is from. For example [email protected]. I appreciate your great work and thanks

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Oh boy, if this can play gifs and videos natively without opening the in-app browser, it will definitely be front runner for the best app so far.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Looks great. I’ve downloaded it and look for to trying it out and seeing how it compares to Memmy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If it’s better than Memmy let me know

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I use both and I prefer Avelon most of the time. It's sleeker and more responsive, probably because of the native code.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait, is Avelon based on Swift?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yup, native Swift app

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks I installed it now Memmy has some potential but honestly it was a bit glitchy

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

As per the other comments, seems super responsive, very Apollo like interface as well. Definitely worth experimenting with.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Memmy and Bean set the bar for iOS Lemmy apps, at least to me. Excited to see how Avelon stacks up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Currently I’m personally using voyager, have used memmy till…. Two days ago when I found out about voyager lol. Will now try out this ine

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Love how it looks! Is there any chance of getting a ‘skip to next top level comment’ button that Apollo and other clients have?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yup, definitely wanna add this. The swipe-to-collapse-thread gesture is the closest thing atm

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah quite similar but less convenient. Loving the app otherwise, very clean!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Congratulations on the release! Is the Test Flight build going to be updated going forwards, or will it be just the main release?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Good question! I'm still gonna use testflight before release, so if you wanna see what's coming earlier and are comfortable with a few more bugs then just keep using testflight.

The testflight version is temporarily outdated just now cause I had to focus on getting the release ready. This won't be the case in a couple days or so

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Awesome, thanks! I'm more than happy to stay on the test flight and report back any issues I find!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It looks really nice! Any plans for an Android version, or is this gonna be iOS-only for now?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The app is written natively for iOS, so an android version is not possible unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I absolutely love that you created a native app, as it’s amazingly fluid, well-integrated and beautiful, though it unfortunately came at the cost of making an Android version not possible.

Thank you for making this!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Bummer, but that makes sense!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The phone app is basically perfect. Not sure how I feel about how the iPad version looks in landscape mode. Maybe if the gray area to the left & right was BLACK, it would work?

Plans for alternate / custom app icons?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you! I wanna do more custom icons, but I'm not that good at graphics design. If people wanna create some icons I'm definitely down for adding a community pack tho.

Avelon is designed for phones first, so the iPad one isn't on par yet. Wanna do split layouts etc at some point, but I figured basic iPad support is better than none.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thank you for the info! Solid start!!!! 🤙🏽

Calling all artists! Creative app icons 🙏🏽

Even a dark icon to replace the white one would be a good start.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Visually great. One thing I could not see was the ability to block communities or users for ALL browsing. This has been valuable to filter out bot users just reposting reddit content and also communities that I am not interested in (nsfw that still manages to come through or communities in a language I do not understand).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If you long press/tap the ellipsis button on posts you can block the community. More advanced filtering tools will be coming at some point

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Just an observation coming from voyager and previously from Apollo.. there is something up with the touch spot for comments. I have never had problems with other clients but for whatever reason I always manage to miss hit the comments link and click on the group instead. Other than that it feels like this is my new Lemmy client

Edit: it only seems to be for long group names where the group name text is directly above the comments link

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not sure I understand what you mean, you can tap anywhere on the post except links/usernames etc to open it. Mind sending a screenshot or something?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Ok.. see this screenshot

https://ibb.co/swLTfk2

The red dot at the bottom is where I would normally tap to see the comments. Muscle memory has me tap there from years of using these apps. I am not sure if there are other places to tap, but that is where I tap. 9/10 if I tap that red place I will end up accidentally getting confidentially_incorrect rather than comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah ok, yeah that makes sense. I'll look at tweaking the touch target to make it easier to tap!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Can confirm I also had to tap 4-5 times on the comments icon/count before I got it right. Otherwise it took me to the community and not the post. In my experience I had to tap below the actual number to get it to work.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Is it FOSS?

[+] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the heads up

Cries in dopamine

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not willing to try any Lemmy app that is locked to the latest iOS only (mlem, lemmios, now avelon).

I see it as a red flag that devs are just experimenting with the latest APIs and not committed to long term support & stability. What about when iOS 17 comes out? are these devs gonna require it because they want to test whatever shiny new thing Apple does?

Seems like a pain for users tbh when iOS is quite buggy on new releases, and alienates ppl who are jailbroken or have old devices. No stable software behaves like that, so these apps feel like an experiment that will soon be canned.

[+] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, SwiftUI is still immature in many areas, so each new version adds a lot of essential features. I'm not talking fancy new things, just the basic stuff that almost every app needs. The alternative is to implement through the older UIkit which is slower to do, especially for people like me who don't really know UIkit from before.

As for Avelon I'm using a few key features introduced with v16. Since I'm just one dev I prioritized polish and features over supporting older versions which would take much more time. Yeah, it sucks if you're stuck on iOS 15, but that's just what I decided to prioritize.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also, as the developer of Lemmios, it is somewhat negligence on my part (not saying this is true for any of the other app developers, just me), we all google when we code and generally the newer features make things much easier so it is really hard to google older features since they are harder to implement and get quite buried. I also think for me at least my apps start as passion projects I don't really expect anyone to use so I forget that iOS versions under my current one exist lol, it's a lot easier to start on 16.0 and stay on 16.0 forever than go lower after the project has started, sorry.