this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Jerboa

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Jerboa is a native-android client for Lemmy, built using the native android framework, Jetpack Compose.

Warning: You can submit issues, but between Lemmy and lemmy-ui, I probably won't have too much time to work on them. Learn jetpack compose like I did if you want to help make this app better.

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Jerboa is made by Lemmy's developers, and is free, open-source software, meaning no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital, ever. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.

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founded 2 years ago
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Any chance of putting this on F-droid? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I don't use the Play store (don't want a Google account) and prefer to stay away Github because Microsoft. Thanks.

Added: Thanks for the links! Unfortunately it looks like the app requires Android 8.0+ and my phone is still on Android 7. Is that inherent to Jetpack or some other part of the app technology? It would be good to not have to keep churning to the latest shiny.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Heyo, come check out my fork of Jerboa, I backported it to work for Android version 5 through 7 that you have.

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

Ok, I installed the 0.34+hotfix .apk since lemmy.world is still running 0.17.something. I was able to connect and look around at some posts. Then I tried to add my lemmy.ml account. I entered my username and password and clicked "login" and the app immediately crashed (Android error box saying Jerboa has stopped, or something like that). I tried again and it crashed again the same way. Then I tried lemmy.world (since it is running the earlier server version) and interestingly, that let me log in.

Comments from less than a minute of playing with it:

  • Scrolling posts around is slow and janky compared to RedReader. That might not be a fair comparison since Jerboa is pic heavy while RedReader is all text. But, a nice settings option might be to not show the pictures if that speeds it up. If the user wants to see a picture, they can click something.

  • Figuring out how to log in took some messing around. Clicking the profile and home icons said "log in first" but didn't say how. It would be good if they provided some kind of hover or hold-down link to log in.

  • The profile "about" screen shows your username but not what instance you are logged into. It would be nice to add that. Screen space permitting, it could also be nice to display the username under the profile icon, instead of the uninformative word "Profile".

Thanks for the backport!!! Can I ask what the purpose of the fork is for, other than the backport? I hope that you can send your changes upstream and that upstream will accept them.

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

lemmy.ml is on 0.18 so jerboa 0.34 doesn't work with it, only 0.35. Shouldn't crash but well...

Honestly I'd suggest using the browser, the web interface works perfectly well on mobile. If you use Firefox or any other browser that can install UserScripts, you can add some useful ones like https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-rewrite-links-to-home-instance and https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469196-gm-lemmy-newtab

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

Thanks. Unfortunately I'm unable to login to either lemmy.world or lemmy.ml from a mobile browser (Fennic). The spinner thingie just spins forever. The only way I can post from mobile right now is with Jerboa.

Yeah that makes sense about Jerboa 0.34 vs Lemmy 0.18. I guess I will wait for lemmy.world to update to 0.18, then update my Jerboa installation. Eventually I think I want to write my own client (it will have a web interface that looks like news.ycombinator.com) and maybe run my own Lemmy instance so my reading is not tracked.

Also, Lemmy on a mobile browser uses a completely ridiculous amount of bandwidth. I haven't checked how much it uses with Jerboa. But it is way more bloaty than the Reddit app I used to use was.

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

You could use Firefox on mobile and use ublock origin to auto-block images & third-party content by default, then it doesn't use almost any bandwidth. I'd imagine jerboa uses similar amounts since it also displays images without any data saver settings as I can see.

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

  1. Lemmy under firefox uses a ton of mobile bandwidth separately from images, maybe because of javascript bloat.

  2. I'm unable to login to Lemmy from mobile firefox (the spinner just keeps spinning), though I can browse without logging in.

I do like the idea of keeping track of read and unread posts on the client side, so maybe that capability can make it into the app. I.e. I'd like the communities screen to show me for each community, how many posts I haven't looked at yet. I'd similarly like the community view to show me threads with unread comments. Usenet readers have had this feature since forever and it made Reddit a regression by comparison.

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

I forked this version to play around with it, I also found I couldn't log in to Beehaw so I made this patch specifically bc of that.

I'm not sure whether the main developer would want to add my patches into an older version of the app, they are probably focused on improving the latest version. They are also running into a little trouble supporting multiple Android versions as it is, I wouldn't want to inundate them with support requests from Android 5 to 7 users.

The fact there isn't a tutorial might make it a little difficult. The profile screen usually uses display name. Profile might be used because a longer name might not fit well on one line.

I'm thinking of updating every now and then with new changes, when I have time and when breaking changes happen as it did with the Lemmy update.

  • Note that yeah you have to use a v35 app to login to lemmy 0.18 server like lemmy.ml, v34 works for 0.17.x and lower only. I didn't have a chance to add both versions' login method handling on one app.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks, it's hard to tell how many users are still on Android 7 but it seems to be fewer than I had expected. Still, if supporting the old versions isn't difficult, I hope that upstream will accept it. Meanwhile I will try to be a little more open to getting another phone.

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

Numbers reported by Google as of May 30 2023... 92.4% have 8.0 or later. 3% have Android 7, 4% have Android 5 and 6, 0.5% still run less than 5.0.

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

That is pretty frightening. Lots of perfectly good phones must have gone in the trash. Maybe I will look for a used Pixel 4A.

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

Wow thanks! I'll try.