I’m desktop-only user and never had any experience with Reddit/Lemmy apps, and the sentiment towards them confuzes me.
I can imagine that the third-party apps for Reddit were better (?not bugged?) than the official one. But what made you to love them? Was the experience even better than desktop use?

Feel free to write about both Reddit and Lemmy apps in your responses.

  • bagfatnick@kulupu.duckdns.org
    9·
    1 year ago

    I think ultimately it depends on what your use case is. Comparing Apollo to any web version of Reddit, there were already a few use cases which were definitely superior in my view:

    • the video / gif player with supports scrubbing by touch.
    • packaging comment chains into screenshots to share, with automated features like blurring usernames, selecting depth of parent / child comments to include, merging with post content
    • being able to “favourite” a sub without actually subscribing
    • hiding posts that you’ve already seen

    Ultimately, as with any tool, the best tool is the one you have on you.

    • Ath47@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      The first and last points are hitting me so hard right now, even just one day after Apollo’s demise. Being able to scrub through a video or GIF was so incredibly useful. You could pause it by holding your finger still, then move back and forth by swiping left or right, even frame by frame if you wanted. I miss that more than I thought I would.

      Also, hiding posts I’ve already seen (or scrolled past) was another lifesaver. One thing I notice on Lemmy (I’m simultaneously testing Mlem, Memmy and wefwef) is that I keep seeing the same posts over and over. Every few hours I open an app to my home page, and scroll through the same few dozen posts that are popular that day, only seeing something new between every five or six familiar posts. Apollo never showed me the same post twice unless I specifically bookmarked it. Much less wasted time.

      • Roberto@toast.oooEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Hiding posts is something I sorely miss, I’m on Android btw and testing several apps.

      • bagfatnick@kulupu.duckdns.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        i don’t have a solution yet for the media playback. Mainly because I don’t seem to have stumbled upon many gifs / videos on Lemmy yet.

        However for the stale posts issue, I’ve found sorting by new or new comments seem to be the best way to get fresh posts. I’ve also put in a feature request for the hide read posts feature to the Wefwef dev. Hopefully they get a chance soon to consider it!

        • Ath47@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          That’s a good point! I admit I avoided sorting by “new” on Reddit just because of the sheer amount of garbage that was posted, especially in popular subreddits. But this is a whole new community and that’s definitely less of a problem. I’ll give it a shot, thanks!