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
Looks good.
I like the more structured Interface especially to the “meta”information of posts (time, community, votes, comments)
It’s cleaner and faster to recognize each field compared to for example memmy I think.
Download images seems to be missing. This would be a dealbreaker at least for me.
It seems that login fails when two factor authentication is active on the account?
Thanks!
Download images seems to be missing.
Good point, that should be an easy addition! For now you can at least long press an image to open in safari and download it from there, but I’ll definitely add a direct download feature.
It seems that login fails when two factor authentication is active on the account?
Hmm, I haven’t actually tried to log in with 2FA enabled so that could be an issue yeah. I’ll take a look at it.
Good point about the long press on the image.
I always tried that, but on the full screen opened image. As used to from Apollo. :)
Check out the latest build, it has both 2FA and image downloads! Cant promise to be this quick in the future lol, but 2FA was a nice catch that I missed earlier
Wow. That has to be some speed record. It’s not a race though. :)
Can confirm both image download and 2fa is working nicely.
Posted from Avelon now!
I like the more structured Interface especially to the “meta”information of posts (time, community, votes, comments)
what do you mean by this? I like what im seeing in avelon, I just dont understand what interface stuff you mean
I mean all the technical informations around the post. What community it was posted in, how much votes, what kind of content, etc. it’s much easier to see in Avelon compared to example memmy I think. Not even talking about Lemmys current webui. :/
2 screenshots as example.
This is really nice, what is it written in?
Thanks! It’s a native app written in Swift using almost entirely SwiftUI, with a bit of UIKit sprinkled on top where it fell short. It actually runs pretty well on macOS too, though the layout is a bit messed up right now. Might look at a macOS version over time if I end up working on split view etc. for iPad.
I loved working with SwiftUI in college. It was the only UI work I enjoyed doing. Wish I had an iPhone to test this out!
Very nice, SwiftUI seemed pretty difficult to work with from what little I’ve done with it. I gotta stick with React Native to get anything done lol. I really like the community view btw
I like react too, but I think SwiftUI is pretty great to work with once you get used to the immutable-views-design. Some things might get a bit tricky, but it’s honestly super quick to get a decent looking UI up and running with some basic functionality
This looks awesome! Best of luck from one Lemmy app dev to another :)
Thank you! Good luck to you as well, very cool to see all the devs interested in Lemmy. Everything that’s happening here feels very unique, not something I’ve really seen before!
Wow! This is such a clean UI. I absolutely love it. From your list of missing functionality I’d like to upvote creating posts. :)
Finally, the eighth app!
Looks good so far, I’ll check it out in depth later today. Immediately liked the community search.
Hahah can’t be too many, right? Great to see so much enthusiasm from devs.
Glad to hear about the quick search, I really wanted that feature myself. Might have to make it even more powerful, its a great way to quickly get wherever you need to go. Let me know what you think!
Yeah I loved hopping from one Reddit app to another back when I was on Android.
As a programmer, watching those new apps in development is awesome, so exciting to see how they implement different features and what new things they might come up with.
Hope you have room for one more soon! :D
Any reason to not support iOS 15? Also, is it open source?
Hello, world
The only things that are missing for me are a way to save posts and multiple account support. Aside from that, Avelon looks amazing!
