cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/116554
Hello community! 👋
I wanted to drop a short announcement: I’m building an iOS client for lemmy, named Lemon 🍋!
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 😅).
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:
- 🔒 Logging in and registering (including instance search + information browsing such as user count, location, accepting memberships, etc!)
- 💡 Light and Dark modes
- 🔼 Upvoting / downvoting posts with optimistic updates and rollbacks (including swipe to vote!)
- 🚀 highly performant feed with infinite scroll
- 📚 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!
I’m excited to see how it turns out! Send a link to TestFlight when you want feedback!
I definitely will. Thanks for your support!
That’s awesome! I wish you luck in your endeavor and will be eagerly watching how your project comes along. Very exciting prospect to have a good iOS client for Lemmy.
Thank you for the kind words! I will do my best to make the best Lemmy client for iOS. Excited to share with you all as development progresses! 😃
Fantastic! An Apollo-like app will make switching so much easier for so many people
That’s precisely my goal - to make Lemmy as easy and as fun to use as Reddit is/was with great apps like Apollo! :) I hope to do a small part in helping Lemmy to grow 🤞
If you can get anything close to Apollo, you will be able to get at least a decent paying following, including me.
Thanks for the kind words! I will do my best :)
LOVE the name!!!
❤️🍋❤️
That’s awesome! Will be keeping an eye out for updates.
Thank you for your support! 🙌
It would be awesome if it could also support older iOS versions similar to how Apollo did it. I’m on an older iOS version (for reasons) and Mlem can’t be installed here. So I’ll going to jump on the first App that can :D
Meanwhile I’m using the website. But it’s UX is kinda not so great for mobile.
Right now, the plan is to support iOS 13 or higher. So if you make that cut off, you should be able to use Lemon! :)
Awesome!
I look forward to following your progress. I will sadly miss Apollo
I will too. Apollo was such a great app. I am still hopeful that the developer will pivot to Lemmy support! More options for Lemmy is only a good thing🤞
Is this on GitHub?
It is not, currently. Still figuring out if I want to open or close source this ala Apollo. Hoping to have the licensing figured out over the next few weeks.
If it is closed source, I don’t trust it. It would need to be permissively licensed if it ends up in the Apple Store. I would recommend Apache-2.0 for a permissive license.
Are there plans to support kbin aswell?
Not at the moment, but possibly in the future!
Happy to see the user options for browsing Lemmy expanding. Are you planning to open source it or is this a closed-source commercial product?
Any chance it is/will be compatible with kbin?
Not currently in the roadmap, but I’ve gotten this question a few times, so I may consider it in the future once Lemmy support is stable.
Wow, the app looks great so far! I will be excited to follow along with your work.
Thank you! 🙏
That’s great to see someone taking this on. In the mean time I created a shortcut to the website on my iPhone using “Add to Home Screen” functionality within the share button options in Safari. It presents like an app on the Home Screen and resembles a wrapper for the website, which seemed like the low hanging fruit solution to what I wanted. I’ve done this with all my favourite sites.
I love to do that, too! Really awesome what is possible with PWA’s these days :D
