this post was submitted on 27 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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- Open source, AGPL License.
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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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- bitcoin:
1Hefs7miXS5ff5Ck5xvmjKjXf5242KzRtK - ethereum:
0x400c96c96acbC6E7B3B43B1dc1BB446540a88A01 - monero:
41taVyY6e1xApqKyMVDRVxJ76sPkfZhALLTjRvVKpaAh2pBd4wv9RgYj1tSPrx8wc6iE1uWUfjtQdTmTy2FGMeChGVKPQuV - cardano:
addr1q858t89l2ym6xmrugjs0af9cslfwvnvsh2xxp6x4dcez7pf5tushkp4wl7zxfhm2djp6gq60dk4cmc7seaza5p3slx0sakjutm
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founded 2 years ago
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A developer of an open source application being attacked my an entitled user. A story as old as time, yet very sad to see over and over again.
Dear user, you are getting something for free. Open source even. If you don't like how it works, fork it and develop your own, or do your part in helping out debug and investigate. Or just stop using it.
This is not a big corporation with dozens or hundreds of devs working on an app that you pay for with ads or premium subscriptions. This is a free app, developed by volunteers. Please be nice. You can complain, but be civil about it.
Could not have said it better!
I am not sure what the general expectation was from the mass influx of people coming from Reddit, I can say it saddens me to see the daily barrage of complaints. Lately it is not even constructive criticism, it's just all out bitching about this or that...
Lemmy is ALPHA software, and suffering from a HUGE influx of new users. There are and will be growing pains.
Jerboa is ALPHA software, and suffering from a HUGE influx of new users. There are and will be growing pains.
Either get involved with development, move on to something else, or deal with it. Posting a daily rant (most of which have already been stated, and addressed or will be) is helping absolutely no one.
Yeah, I feel like we have a bunch of other apps now that do what Jerboa does, but better now. If I were Jerboa devs, I would focus on lemmy-ui and leave the mobile apps to 3rd parties, while keeping Jerboa and Mlem functional, but not feature rich. Too much to do, too little time. Lemmy and Lemmy-ui are the primary things that the majority of users rely on.
If I were a mobile app dev trying to supply a app for Lemmy, I think I would start with RedReader which is a Reddit client, and see if I could retarget it to Lemmy instead of writing a new app from the ground up. It is on F-droid if anyone wants to check it out.
Just fyi, there are a ton of mobile apps in development right now that are very promising.
Connect for Lemmy
Thunder
Jerboa
Sync for Lemmy (not yet realeased dev)
Connect is my go to at the moment. Thunder is really pretty, but not yet there with features. Jerboa is actually lagging behind a bit, but IMO, that's 100% fine. Focus on bots and lemmy itself, not the Android app.
Thanks, yeah, I know about the other apps but I think the existing reddit apps that have already had tons of user testing are an underutilized resource. Sync is the exception but it is proprietary. I currently have no way to log into reddit from mobile except through an app, since login from the web view is broken.
I'm not that crazy about Lemmy's web UI either. I have an impulse (but probably not the energy to act on it) to implement an alternative web UI that is more text oriented, so the web view would look like Hacker News.
I do want to start looking at the backend code, to get some exposure for Rust if nothing else.
I'm sorry if this seems like an attack, the whole point I'm trying to make is that jerboa might not be as ready as we think for being a lemmy client. Open source projects are extremely hard, an mostly never rewarding, and I totally understand that. I hope that those who have the skill and time will make it better, but right now it can contain flaws that make basic features unusable, and who knows what actually runs in the background
I'm one of those random guys who try to improve things submitting a PR now and then fucking up things in the progress and trying to fix them again.
What I want to say is: I think you might be right saying Jerboa might not be as ready as many think. It started as a side project of one of the two guys who develop Lemmy full time. Dessalines even writes in Jerboa's README that people can submit issues but he will most likely not be able to work on them.
Now Lemmy exploded: A lot of people started contributing to Jerboa (including me) with vastly varying skill levels (me definitely on the lower end), there's no clear route the app will go in the future, no or little standards we can use as orientation.
And actually I'm not surprised at all that Jerboa might not be ready because this app went from "Just a little side project with 150 stars on GitHub on June 3" to "Probably most popular Lemmy client with 787 stars on June 27". This has been less than four weeks. I don't think any project is able to adapt to this influx of requests, changes, attention in this short time.
Who knows what runs in the background?
In an open source project? Really?