this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Apple

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Hi there fellow Apple enthusiasts!

Yesterday I announced that my native iOS app for Lemmy called Avelon is finally ready for testing, and I figured some people here might also be interested in checking it out!

My focus for the app has been performance, design and ease of use. As you can probably tell I got a lot of inspiration from Apollo and other iOS-first apps - but I think I've added my own cool spin on both the design and functionality.

Here's a couple screenshots of the app:

If you wanna try it out I'd greatly appreciate any feedback/suggestions so I know what to focus on next! I think the core experience is pretty solid already, but the app still lacks some important features such as adding new posts.

Download Avelon (Testflight)

Avelon is developed in Swift using almost enitrely SwiftUI. For those unfamiliar, SwiftUI is the newest UI library by Apple intended to replace things like UIKit over time. SwiftUI is cross platform, so Avelon also runs on macOS actually, though the UI is not tweaked to fit mac just yet. The tech is really great to work with, and it makes it super easy to fit right into iOS. I posted some more details about the project over on the community page for the app here if you wanna check it out.

Thanks, let me know what you think!

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[–] [email protected] 119 points 1 year ago

The 3rd party app scene flourishing for Lemmy is the perfect "fuck you".

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Downloaded. Looks really good so far

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Awesome, looking forward to hearing what you think!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Didn’t even finish submitting my feedback before you pushed an update lol. Keep up the good work

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

really enjoying the app so far, the onboarding process is amazing. I’d love an option to have big thumbnails when using the large post option like this: https://files.catbox.moe/6y6wzl.jpeg

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Good idea! I'll look at adding this as an option

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Looks good so far. I’m really missing the swipe to up/downvote, reply, collaps, report options in compact mode. Any plans for something like that?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Definitely, I've implemented a few swipe actions already, but they're still a bit buggy so I need to rework the gestures before it's ready to release.

Edit: The latest release now has customizable swipe gestures!

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

Collapse seems to work for me. Otherwise, agreed. It’s much snappier than Memmy (what I’ve been using mostly thus far), on the upside!

Edit: also would like an option to see both upvote and downvote count

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Oh my God! This is my favorite Lemmy app now. I've been looking for a good native app and this is it! So fluid, fast loading, it's awesome!!!

Keep up the good work, can't wait for new updates.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Commenting from Avelon. App is very smooth! I don’t know if it’s just me, having that subscriptions on the leftmost side on the nav bar kinda threw me off, was expecting posts there haha

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Does it have Apollo’s full width swipe back? That’s the one thing I have yet to see implemented with any other app ever. As someone who just broke their wrist it’d be a damn godsend.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I really want this too actually, but I honestly have no idea how Apollo did this. Might have to write the whole iOS-navigation-UI-stuff from scratch which is a bit much. I considered adding a floating back button of some kind - not quite the same, but better with a broken wrist hopefully.

[–] lightsecond 7 points 1 year ago

Here you go. It was a custom implementation but i don’t know enough about iOS development to say how difficult it would be to implement.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

And here I thought nothing was going to pull me away from Voyager/WefWef

This is damn good

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Hey, one of the Mlem devs here, Welcome to the club. Be advised we are hitting issues getting on the AppStore, apparently Apple says that we are "exploiting the popularity of the Lemmy trademark". You might have to deal with that once you submit... Good Luck, Your app is looking good. ❤️

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

So apparently Avelon doesn’t support iOS 15. So that’s a no go for me. If you aren’t specifically targeting iOS 16+ API’s consider targeting lower version of IOS. It’s why I’ll keep using Memmy.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just downloaded it and the interface is stunning. The app is fluid and smooth, I’m surprised it’s so polished. Nice job!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Really glad to hear that, worked hard on polishing the core stuff and making the app as smooth as possible. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I’ll check it out. Thanks for your hard work!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The onboard flow is bar none the best in the Fediverse. UI is great too.

I think the UX, especially the tab choices and arrangement, are sub par. In particular, I would rethink some of the tab drill down. Subscriptions on the left when the default state is to not be logged in, is weird. I think I would hide that entirely until a user is logged in, or find a better way to default to or drill into your subscriptions after logging in.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

App looks gorgeous! Once it has some more features parity to memmy or voyager I can definitely see myself switching to this.

Do you have a community yet to discuss the app?

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

Ah, support for Lemmy community links is missing I guess 😅 Avelon opens the link in Mail. Anyway, thanks for the very good work, I already love the app (Memmy user here)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can't sort by Top: 1 hour, 6 Hour, 12 Hour. That's a no go from me, because this site needs that. Sorting by Hot is broken.

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

Is that not a API restriction?

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

I think it was introduced in the 0.18 api

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Looks and feels good so far! Would suggest settings for NSFW behavior. For example, As of now, posts are blurred and when clicked upon they are displayed. If you scroll past the image they are still visible if you go back. Avalon for example, "re blurs” it of you scroll past it, an behavior I like.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I’m quite a fan of voyager (née wefwef), but out of curiosity, I tend to install all lemmy apps and give them a whirl.

I have to say, there is quite a lot to like about your app. I’m very curious to see where it goes next.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hi @[email protected], since this is your own app, can you please tag this as [Self Promo] (prepend the post title)? We're tightening up rules regarding self promo and while we're not removing your post, we want to clarify this post.

Side note, your app is listed in the pinned post of iOS apps. Please leave a comment there if you want it updated (e.g., new link or AppStore link when it's released).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Done, thanks for letting me know!

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[–] acow 4 points 1 year ago

The speed and smoothness are amazing! Missing swipe to vote and better link handling.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Summary of me looking at the app for about 20 minutes:

Having subscriptions as it’s own tab is confusing as hell to me and leads to a weird UX as the UI first needs to switch to the posts tab before triggering the navigation there. This results in a harsh change of the content followed by the pushing of the new screen. Took me a while to realize what was happening as I thought there was a bug that added images to the subscription rows as this happens fast enough to not make you realize you are seeing Posts/All for a split second.

All/local/… does not react to changes in the set post style. Pull to refresh will not help. Only switching via the Navigation Bar menu will update the post layout.
While we are at it. A preview for this setting would be great.

Switching to the account tap will always return you to the first screen and not the sunscreen you were on previously. At least that problem does not exists for posts.

Guests instances could really use an explanation about what they do.

The NavigationBar is very not iOS like.
The back button should have a meaningful label and having no title until you scroll feels wrong. I think you are trying to emulate the butchered detail view of the mail app, but without the back button text this just feels empty but adding it might be enough to make it work.

Also there is a UI bug when the navigationBar (dis)appears where the back button vanishes first/gets added before the bar appears.

Tapping next to the comments count beneath the post sometimes collapses/expands the post. Sometimes not.

Sorry if I sound a bit harsh. I see a lot of potential in this app. But also a lot of work.
Onboarding is pretty great though.

Keep on keeping on!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This needs thumbnails on the left as well as marking post read on opening thumbnails, other than that it looks great!

Onboarding looks great and the performance is perhaps the best I’ve ever experienced trying various Lemmy apps.

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

Tried using it and it crashed on every attempt to post a reply to something. That being said I’m on the iOS17 dev beta so that could have something to do with it. Looked good though.

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

I've heard about this reply crash several times but haven't been able to reproduce it, if it's an iOS 17 issue that makes sense! I'm not on the beta yet myself

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

I'm an Android person. But I wanted to say thank you for your work on that app for the community! You're awesome!

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

Really, really slick.

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

I can’t log into my instance. It gets as far asking for my MFA code, but it’s never correct. (Yes, the code works on other apps/devices.)

EDIT: Actually, I can’t log into Mlem either. It might be my instance. False alarm.

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

Looks nice, will use it for now.

One thing I would like suggest is in the login screen. Why not put a drop-down menu there where users can select the most used servers? Or something autocomplete like while typing the domain.

Thanks for all your effort. Really looking forward for future updates and AppStore release.

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

Very nice! Loving the Explore tab for finding communities, and the animations feel good!

I have a feature request: dark mode thats more of a dark gray than "amoled black". I find the contrast of white text on pitch black too much.

Edit: ...and iPad support would be awesome!

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

Make it defaul to no NSFW post and i will recommend it to my family

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I like where you are going with this. Looks good so far.

I have one feature request. I really liked the way that Apollo would share pictures and videos. A typical use case for me would be find a funny image. Long press to share, send the shared image to any other app that supported sharing using the built in share sheet. That way I could do all kinds of different things. Save to my NAS, run it through a Shortcut send, or to a friend via whatever app.

Keep up the good work!

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