I’ve had enough of the text editing issue, where when you press backspace it highlights the space before the word and ends up deleting it. The developer passes off responsibility for this to the engine they use and seems to have no intention of addressing it.
What are the pros and cons of the other Android apps? I’m only considering ones on F-Droid, not the Play Store, so that rules out Summit and Boost. Ones I have available are:
- Thunder (IzzyOnDroid)
- Interstellar (IzzyOnDroid)
- Voyager
- Eternity
- muffed (IzzyOnDroid)
- Combustible
I’ve been using Voyager for a few months and I love it. Highly recommended.
I’ve tried pretty much every app there is and ended up with Thunder. It’s got a huge amount of features and polish, a clean UI and gets regular updates. The only issue is that I don’t see the number of upvotes on posts since my home instance upgraded Lemmy, though that will probably get fixed soon.
I’ve been using Thunder since I came to Lemmy, and I’m shocked to not see it mentioned more. It’s fantastic, and seems to just feel right as someone that used rif for reddit
I tried thunder looking for exactly what you’re saying but it didn’t feel like rif with so many of the customization and settings that rif provided not being present. I don’t just want something that looks like rif, I want something that works like it.
That’s why I ultimately fell onto Summit. It is basically the one app I’ve found after trying them all that genuinely feels like rif, because it’s packed to the brim with customizations and settings, with a very responsive dev, and fits the rif aesthetic (though you can change it to be however you like). It scratched that rif itch and I haven’t touched another app since.
I might give Summit a go at some point then. I was never a power user of rif, so thumbnails appearing in the same places and general text size / layout etc was enough for me to draw comparisons.
I’m also way more active on Lemmy than I ever was on Reddit, I probably have more comments here in just over a year than I did in like a decade on reddit, so my use case has also changed I guess.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Voyager is fantastic.
I went from Jerboa to Eternity to Thunder. I liked Eternity a lot but it doesn’t get developed very actively which causes issues. Spoiler tags for example aren’t implemented correctly. Voyager seems to be great as well from all I have heard, but I don’t like its UI.
UI preference is a key decider, imo!
That’s why I support Eternity (and Infinity before that), but also use Voyager (I have a lot of others installed too, but they sleep).
I went from Jerboa to Eternity to Raccoon to Voyager. I have to say Voyager is the most mature lemmy app when it comes to current features, development of new features, customizability and stability.
FYI lemmy is a Progressive Web App you can install from your mobile browser of choice
Never bothered with any 3rd party apps
So is Voyager (also on fdroid, but is just a pwa) and its miles ahead of the native Lemmy UI.
I’m using an app called Hermit for this. It makes webpages into apps and gives flexibility to customize them heavily. User scripts as well. It works great with my instance (lemdroid) since they offer a few front end options.
You can also solo apps from each other. Definitely check it out.
Hermit is closed-source, unfortunately. I wish there would be a FOSS alternative to it.
Damn. Let me know if you find it.
I understand you prefer f-droid, I’m also an old FOSS user, but I used Sync for reddit for like 13 years and bought the “no ads” version of Sync for lemmy in the first hour it came out too… I only used Jerboa in the beginning for a couple of months.
I can’t get anything else to look and feel as nice as Sync, either. It’s even worth spoiler tags not always working.
Using a closed-source app to browse an open-source, decentralized site is ridiculous for me.
Yeah I never really liked Sync on reddit, I went for Relay as its UI suited my workflow. However in hindsight Relay was dodgy as even the paid app included trackers.
I use Jerboa with zero problems. My keyboard is OpenBoard with Gesture Typing (similar to Swype) and I have none of the issues you report.
Yeah others are saying it’s to do with the keyboard, or rather that other keyboards seem to get around the bug. However it’s only Jerboa that I have this issue with.
I’m using the standard Android Keyboard (AOSP), so it’s not something you would expect to have errors. Don’t really want to change as I’m used to it and have it set up for different nationalities (Greek for maths, couple other countries for their funky accented letters).
Once you try swiping to type, you never want to go back. And OpenBoard has Greek letters of course. Honestly, give it a spin - regardless of your problem with Jerboa: I bet you’ll love it. Worst case, you’ll have wasted 10 minutes installing it, trying it out without success and uninstalling it 🙂
I tried Thunder, Sync, Liftoff, Boost, and settled on Eternity.
Muffed & Combustible, seem to be dead, Interstellar early development it seems & more geared towards Kbin… Eternity (very good) recently had a update after months of inactivity, whereas Voyager & Thunder (both excellent) have active devs and continuous support & updates…
Looks like I’ll lean towards Voyager and Thunder, might give Eternity a go also. I had Voyager before but was sticking it out with Jerboa, we’ll see how I feel this time. Thanks!
You can’t really go wrong with either of those, I do lean towards Voyager as a personal preference… Raccoon is another that I really like, but I’m not sure if that will see any further development…🤷🏻♂️
I cycled from all apps but keep ending in Summit. Yes I understand the FOSS attitude I really do but it all comes down to usability and UI and active development. Voyager and Eternity are my next options.
Sorry to fork the conversation, but I noticed nobody mentioned connect. Are these other apps really a lot better?.
Based on the Megathread, Connect doesn’t have an F-Droid repo.
Oooh. Yup. I need coffee. Thanks.
I tried the paid ones like Boost and Sync but eventually have settled on Thunder. It mostly just works and is still being actively developed
Seconding Thunder. It’s my daily driver. Eternity is also nice if you want to quickly swipe through a bunch of posts.
I’ve never had this happen, does it need a special set of circumstances?
I get a similar glitch with all keyboards based on AOSP (openboard, etc), where pressing backspace randomly jumps back a few words
I eventually switched back to swiftkey because it was unbearable
I also have never seen that behavior. And even if, would it matter in any way how it handles the backspace key?
It’s an absolute pain in the ass. When you press backspace once, the underline for autocorrect extends to the space before the word, then when you press it again it deletes the space, merging it with the word before. It will keep doing this over and over if you keep pressing backspace. You then have to go through and position the cursor just so in the middle of the word to add the spaces back - or, if you don’t notice it, you submit the comment and then have to edit it, which marks your comment and makes it dirty (lol, one thing I loved about reddit was the 3 minute leeway for edits).
I still fail to see that this is an issue. I use the backspace key only when I make a mistake. You seem to hang up the whole user experience of an app off it. Just make less mistakes that require you to use backspace.
I make little typos all the time, and often go back and edit things to change the shape of my comment. The backspace thing is a little thing, but it’s persistent and frequently annoying.
Also *fewer :p
Basically when you press backspace the underline for autocorrect extends over the space before the word, then when you press backspace again it deletes that space. Every other press of backspace will delete the space before, completely messing up the text when you’re just trying to make a minor correction. You then have the hassle of pixel hunting to get the cursor in the middle of the word where the space was to add it back again.
Ok my bad seems like I recalled incorrectly, your description fits exactly my experience. It’s the keyboard
It’s not really the keyboard though, the keyboard works fine everywhere else. It’s a poor implementation from the text editor that Jerboa uses, one that other keyboards have created a workaround for. But the issue is in the text editor.
It’s like when a website only works in Chrome, but doesn’t work in Firefox. It isn’t because Firefox is broken, it’s because the website doesn’t follow web standards and has only been tested in Chrome.
I see, there’s the keyboard on one side and the text editor on the other, and they don’t mesh well ? that makes more sense
I use Thunder on IOS, but since it’s cross-platform and assuming the experience is the same, I recommend Thunder.
