cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4709002
Hi everyone!
It’s been quite the journey, but Avelon is finally on the App Store!
Click here to download!
The app is includes a lot of awesome features requested by the community, including:
- Sleek design that fits right in on iOS & iPadOS
- Highly customizable look & behavior
- Mark read on scroll & hide read posts
- Customizable swipe gestures
- Multiple account support
- Smart link previews in posts and comments
- Support for videos, gifs, photos & other media
- Custom font support
- Write replies with markdown highlighting
- Privacy focused - the app has no tracking of any kind
- Gallery mode + hide bars on scroll = full immersion … and a lot more!
Screenshots
Here’s some cool app store screenshots of the app:
Developing this app has been one of the best development experiences I’ve had, and I feel very privileged and happy to have been able to contribute to Lemmy in this way. Nothing is more motivating than seeing so many people already enjoying the app and providing suggestions and feedback.
I really hope you enjoy Avelon, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about what everyone thinks. Keep the feedback coming!
Thank you, Sigve Rokenes
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Looks like the best client so far! Replacing Voyager with this, thank you for this amazing app!
Edit: is it possible to view the instance name in the community name when scrolling down the feed? That seems like the only feature I’m missing from Voyager… (e.g. linux@lemmy.world instead of just linux)
Coming in the next version! For both communities & users
Yes I am missing this too. How about also the option to see the instance that the poster is from. For example pedroparamo@lemm.ee. I appreciate your great work and thanks
Oh boy, if this can play gifs and videos natively without opening the in-app browser, it will definitely be front runner for the best app so far.
Looks great. I’ve downloaded it and look for to trying it out and seeing how it compares to Memmy.
If it’s better than Memmy let me know
I use both and I prefer Avelon most of the time. It’s sleeker and more responsive, probably because of the native code.
Thanks I installed it now Memmy has some potential but honestly it was a bit glitchy
Wait, is Avelon based on Swift?
Yup, native Swift app
As per the other comments, seems super responsive, very Apollo like interface as well. Definitely worth experimenting with.
Memmy and Bean set the bar for iOS Lemmy apps, at least to me. Excited to see how Avelon stacks up.
Currently I’m personally using voyager, have used memmy till…. Two days ago when I found out about voyager lol. Will now try out this ine
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Congratulations on the release! Is the Test Flight build going to be updated going forwards, or will it be just the main release?
Good question! I’m still gonna use testflight before release, so if you wanna see what’s coming earlier and are comfortable with a few more bugs then just keep using testflight.
The testflight version is temporarily outdated just now cause I had to focus on getting the release ready. This won’t be the case in a couple days or so
Awesome, thanks! I’m more than happy to stay on the test flight and report back any issues I find!
Love how it looks! Is there any chance of getting a ‘skip to next top level comment’ button that Apollo and other clients have?
Yup, definitely wanna add this. The swipe-to-collapse-thread gesture is the closest thing atm
Yeah quite similar but less convenient. Loving the app otherwise, very clean!
The phone app is basically perfect. Not sure how I feel about how the iPad version looks in landscape mode. Maybe if the gray area to the left & right was BLACK, it would work?
Plans for alternate / custom app icons?
Thank you! I wanna do more custom icons, but I’m not that good at graphics design. If people wanna create some icons I’m definitely down for adding a community pack tho.
Avelon is designed for phones first, so the iPad one isn’t on par yet. Wanna do split layouts etc at some point, but I figured basic iPad support is better than none.
Thank you for the info! Solid start!!! 🤙🏽
Calling all artists! Creative app icons 🙏🏽
Even a dark icon to replace the white one would be a good start.
Visually great. One thing I could not see was the ability to block communities or users for ALL browsing. This has been valuable to filter out bot users just reposting reddit content and also communities that I am not interested in (nsfw that still manages to come through or communities in a language I do not understand).
If you long press/tap the ellipsis button on posts you can block the community. More advanced filtering tools will be coming at some point
It looks really nice! Any plans for an Android version, or is this gonna be iOS-only for now?
The app is written natively for iOS, so an android version is not possible unfortunately.
I absolutely love that you created a native app, as it’s amazingly fluid, well-integrated and beautiful, though it unfortunately came at the cost of making an Android version not possible.
Thank you for making this!
Bummer, but that makes sense!
Source code?
Not open source, but happy to talk more about the implementation if people are interested
Just an observation coming from voyager and previously from Apollo… there is something up with the touch spot for comments. I have never had problems with other clients but for whatever reason I always manage to miss hit the comments link and click on the group instead. Other than that it feels like this is my new Lemmy client
Edit: it only seems to be for long group names where the group name text is directly above the comments link
I’m not sure I understand what you mean, you can tap anywhere on the post except links/usernames etc to open it. Mind sending a screenshot or something?
Ok… see this screenshot
The red dot at the bottom is where I would normally tap to see the comments. Muscle memory has me tap there from years of using these apps. I am not sure if there are other places to tap, but that is where I tap. 9/10 if I tap that red place I will end up accidentally getting confidentially_incorrect rather than comments
Ah ok, yeah that makes sense. I’ll look at tweaking the touch target to make it easier to tap!
Can confirm I also had to tap 4-5 times on the comments icon/count before I got it right. Otherwise it took me to the community and not the post. In my experience I had to tap below the actual number to get it to work.
Is it FOSS?
oh, it also requires ios 16. staying with memmy and thunder for now. maybe in the future.
edit: im using an ogse and not planning to buy a new phone soon. dumbasses.
Thanks for the heads up
Cries in dopamine
I’m not willing to try any Lemmy app that is locked to the latest iOS only (mlem, lemmios, now avelon).
I see it as a red flag that devs are just experimenting with the latest APIs and not committed to long term support & stability. What about when iOS 17 comes out? are these devs gonna require it because they want to test whatever shiny new thing Apple does?
Seems like a pain for users tbh when iOS is quite buggy on new releases, and alienates ppl who are jailbroken or have old devices. No stable software behaves like that, so these apps feel like an experiment that will soon be canned.
an iOS dev explained to me in a separate post that supporting older iOSes significantly limits the Swift features they can use. meaning supporting iOSes requires more work. that is why for apps with a small dev team, they would start with the latest iOS.
this makes me appreciate the apps that do not let older devices get left behind. was interested to try Avelon, unfortunately it is limited to the newest OS.
weird though that people are quick to downvote (see that before the edit, nothing offensive was said) instead of making an explanation. again, i got the explanation from a different post.
Also, as the developer of Lemmios, it is somewhat negligence on my part (not saying this is true for any of the other app developers, just me), we all google when we code and generally the newer features make things much easier so it is really hard to google older features since they are harder to implement and get quite buried. I also think for me at least my apps start as passion projects I don’t really expect anyone to use so I forget that iOS versions under my current one exist lol, it’s a lot easier to start on 16.0 and stay on 16.0 forever than go lower after the project has started, sorry.
thank you for your work and for providing more insight about ios app development. i understand that this is simply a matter of practicality.
it is good to see all these new apps for the fediverse; hope to try yours someday.
Yeah, SwiftUI is still immature in many areas, so each new version adds a lot of essential features. I’m not talking fancy new things, just the basic stuff that almost every app needs. The alternative is to implement through the older UIkit which is slower to do, especially for people like me who don’t really know UIkit from before.
As for Avelon I’m using a few key features introduced with v16. Since I’m just one dev I prioritized polish and features over supporting older versions which would take much more time. Yeah, it sucks if you’re stuck on iOS 15, but that’s just what I decided to prioritize.
i completely understand that you are prioritizing maximum impact for the effort you put in. thank you for your work - will definitely try Avelon someday when i get that new phone.