Lemmy App Development

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/1358038

Hi everyone! I'm happy to announce that my iOS Lemmy app "Avelon" is finally ready for beta testing! I've been working tirelessly on the app lately and I think it is turning into a quite solid experience now. I'm very excited to hear what you think and gather more feedback before I move towards an App Store release.

My focus for Avelon has been to polish the base functionality as much as possible to ensure that the day-to-day browsing feels as good as possible. I've also done things a bit differently to make it easier for new people to try out the Fediverse. Rather than requiring new users to look through a complicated list of instances the first time, the app automatically shuffles a list of preset instances so you don't need to think about it until later when you register. This will hopefully also reduce the load on individual servers.

Features

Avelon already supports quite a few cool features:

• Posts and feeds
  • Clean UI to explore all your feeds
  • A pretty nice comment view
  • Support for images, GIFs, videos, youtube
  • See community feeds and sidebars
  • Quick search communities and subscriptions
• Login to your account
  • Reply to posts/comments (with markdown highlighter!)
  • View and edit your old comments
  • Upvote comments and posts
  • View/manage your followed communities
• Design & customization
  • Dark and light mode with customizable accent color
  • Compact posts, large posts and gallery view
  • Footer/header bars automatically hide for a cleaner experience
  • Change behavior such as tap to collapse, default sorting etc.
  • Long press actions for a less cluttered interface

..and probably some other things I can't remember just now.

Screenshots

Check these out!

Join the beta

The beta is available on testflight through this link (limited to 1000 testers for now):

Join Avelon Beta on Testflight

The app is supported on all iPhones with iOS 16 and higher (worked ok on my old iPhone X!). I'd love to hear what you think about the overall user experience, design, functionality, stability as well as any bugs or issues you might find. A few important features are still missing, most notably adding new posts. I'd love to hear what additions you are most interested in me looking at first:

• Creating posts
• Viewing users comments/posts
• Saving posts/comments
• Report/mod tools
• Multiple accounts
• Themes/more customization
• Improved image/video viewer
• Anything else?

Thank you & future plans

First, I'd like to thank Christian Selig (the developer of the Apollo app) for creating a really amazing app that I've been using every day for the last several years. As you can tell, Avelon is definitely inspired by Apollo (though I think I've put my own personal spin on the design and functionality!).

If people enjoy Avelon I'd like to spend more of my free time working on it and improving the app over time. In the spirit of transparency, I'd like to mention that I might do some kind of "pro" version at some point later on to support the project. All the base functionality people need will of course be free, but pro features could be additional "nice-to-have" features like themes or advanced tools etc. I'm not planning to do anything paid just yet though, just wanted to mention it. Right now my focus is to provide a great experience and to help build the Lemmy platform into something even better.

Finally I'd like to thank the Lemmy developers as well as everyone using the platform. Everyone contributing is making this platform the amazing place it is turning into. I personally haven't browsed the site-that-should-not-be-named since the API shut down - I decided to spend all that time on developing this app instead. And I'm really excited to see what Lemmy becomes over the years.

Sigve Røkenes

/evgiz