EDIT: I've created a community for the Lemon app: [email protected] !
Hello community! ๐
I wanted to drop a short announcement: I'm building an iOS client for lemmy, named Lemon ๐!
It is still very much in early development, only having one week of dev time so far. I'm not yet ready for users (unless you want a lot of bugs ๐ ).
I'll be sharing some development logs throughout the journey. Consider this the first of (hopefully many) entries!
Story time:
For years, I was an avid user of Apollo for Reddit. I was an "ultra subscriber" and occasional donor, since I loved the app and Christian Selig was such a kind and engaged developer. He managed to build both an inspiring app and community.
I was heartbroken when I learned Apollo would shut down due to Reddit's API changes.
Lemon for Lemmy as an homage to Apollo and is greatly inspired by his amazing work (Thank you, Christian!)
Features
Some of the currently-working features are:
- ๐ Logging in and registering (including instance search + information browsing such as user count, location, accepting memberships, etc!)
- ๐ก Light and Dark modes
- ๐ผ Upvoting / downvoting posts with optimistic updates and rollbacks (including swipe to vote!)
- ๐ highly performant feed with infinite scroll
- ๐ persistent cache to read while you're offline
My goal is to make this a fully featured Lemmy client for iOS, and hopefully one day as good as Apollo is/was!
That's all for now. Here's some screenshots. Until next time!
Glad to see another app! Can you talk about what you'll be doing that's different than mlem and memmy? I've tried them both (writing this on mlem) and have enjoyed both. Memmy feels closer to the Apollo experience I'm missing so far.
I'm not very familiar with Mlem or Memmy (both look like fantastic projects!) - so I can't speak to specific feature differences yet. To be totally honest, I'm still figuring out my feature roadmap anyway! :) In the future, I'd love to do a comparison post.
I will say that something I personally care about a lot is the user experience. I'm a frontend engineer by trade, so the visual fidelity, ease of use and overall onboarding experience for new users are things I think about a lot. Especially in this federated world, where many potential users aren't familiar with the concepts.
I'm hoping to make Lemon intuitive, fun and easy to use for the average non-technical person, while still enabling "power user" functionality for those who need it.
I would check both of those out. I like both. MLem feels a lot more polished but is missing a few key features. Memmy is clearly going for the Apollo vibe but is missing some polish. Maybe it would make sense to try to join forces with one (or both) of them?
Not that I mind having more apps to try out, but if you are really trying to go for an Apollo clone you have some competition already.
Thanks for the info! I will check both out :)
No problem! I definitely think there is room for more apps, but I'm not sure if there is a need for more Apollo-inspired apps, if you know what I mean. Or if you really want to follow the Apollo route, I am not aware of any Kbin apps yet and I understand it has a totally different backend.
That's some great feedback, much appreciated! I've had a few requests for kbin support already, that may be something I explore once the Lemmy implementation is stable. :)