Hi Mlem community,

We’re putting the final touches on our 1.3 update, which means it’s time to start looking to the future.

Mlem 2.0

It’s been nearly a year since Mlem took off, and we’ve come a long way in that time. We’ve also learned a lot about the shortcomings of our initial architecture, but in the interests of reaching feature richness we have simply been working around them. 1.3 represents a broad enough feature set that we feel comfortable taking the time to go back and rebuild that original architecture with eight months’ experience to guide us.

Mlem 2.0 will look and feel just about the same, but the new architecture will let us deliver many features that are impossible under the current system, including guest mode and multi-account functionality. It should also be more performant, since we won’t need all our weird workarounds we bolted on to handle cases we didn’t know existed eight months ago.

We’ll also be taking the opportunity to clean up the non-technical side of the house. The app will be transferred from Lionel Hanners’ account to my own, and we will be completely refreshing the TestFlight beta.

iOS Compatibility

Mlem 1.3 will be the final version of Mlem that is compatible with iOS 16. Mlem 2.0’s architecture is built on powerful new SwiftUI features that are only available on iOS 17 and above, and so Mlem 2.0 and beyond will only support iOS 17+.

Cheers,

The Mlem Group

  • daisyKutterEnglish
    12·
    8 months ago

    Thanks for all the effort you guys put for us to enjoy lemmy natively. I have three questions:

    1. Do you plan to add gif scrubbing functionality to the app?
    2. Do you think iOS17 support is going to be long term?
    3. Do you plan to add post/comment search functionality?

    Thanks for the hard work!

    • EricOPMEnglish
      13·
      8 months ago
      1. Yes! We aren’t happy with the current state of our media viewer. 2.0 is a backend-focused rewrite, so probably won’t have a new media viewer on launch, but it’s without a doubt high on our list of important features.
      2. Hard to say. Our iOS compatibility policy guarantees compatibility until iOS18 reaches 75% market share; after that, I can’t make any promises. We take the decision to drop compatibility very seriously, and try to only do so when the features offered by the newer iOS are valuable enough that we would be compromising the potential quality of the app by ignoring them.
      3. Yes. We’re still working out some UX concerns stemming from the fact that it’s very slow to search posts and comments compared to communities, but it’s in the plans.
  • gregorum@lemm.eeEnglish
    11·
    8 months ago

    Very nice. Do you have any sort of timeframe estimate for 2.0? Is it going to be a while before we see any new versions while you rework your code base?

    Best of luck!

    • EricOPMEnglish
      16·
      8 months ago

      We’re reluctant to give concrete time estimates since our development time is constrained by our day jobs and other responsibilities, but we hope to have 2.0 in early TestFlight on a schedule roughly in line with our release cadence (~2mo).

      We don’t plan to release any new features to the 1.x codebase after 1.3, but we will continue to fix major bugs and maintain compatibility against changes to the Lemmy API while we bring 2.0 up.

  • dlundh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    8 months ago

    Very nice! I already love Mlem so I can’t wait to try out the next generation!

  • Greg@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    Are there plans to add a “mark as read on scroll” feature like other apps have?

    • EricOPMEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      It’s currently live on the TestFlight beta! We’re planning to roll it out to the App Store in the next few days.