I’m currently using Sync even though it’s closed source because it was still a really well-made app, but it seems to be abandonware now. Jerboa is great and it’s actively developed, but IMO it’s also the ugliest one.
Can you recommend any of the other FOSS ones, especially one that handles our glorious emotes well?
Firefox for Android
firefox
Same. The site layout on firefox for android is great.
I use the website, purely because none of the apps have an emoji picker.
Just Firefox here as well.
Thunder has been my favorite for a while. It displays emotes, but I don’t think any app has an emoji picker.
The dev added a feature I requested on their comm within like a day too.
Yeah I don’t expect any app to support the emoji picker which is a custom Hexbear feature. I do like the look of Thunder actually, and it seems in active development. I might give it a try.
Apps are a form of liberalism
I use voyager because it follows the same design principles of Apollo and that was the best experience that I’ve ever had using Reddit. I’m fairly sure you can use it as a PWA too so you don’t even need an actual app
Eternity.
It doesn’t make the emojis easy to use but I have a system. I ended up leaving reddit because they weren’t going to let us use Infinity anymore, which I used exclusively for years. So, it was only natural for me to pick up Eternity once they ported it over here. I even have a similar theme. Sometimes I forget I’m on a completely different platform. It feels completely seamless.
I’m also a big fan of Infinity, I actually still use it by building it from source with a custom API token. My issue with Eternity though is that it seems abandoned, the repo hasn’t been updated in over 5 months. I’m trying to move away from Sync precisely because it is abandonware…
Hmm. Well, I’m not a techie or anything but I wouldn’t consider it abandoned yet.
5 months doesn’t seem like too long a time for me. They took a year to release the first update after the initial release so maybe that’s just their timeframe. It still works for me. If they don’t release by 2026 then I’ll probably have to migrate again, which will be disappointing.
The problem is seemingly it’s been 5 months since anybody’s touched the code, not just 5 months since the last release. There are issues that have been open for weeks or months without any of the devs even replying to them. It’s not a great look, at least… The core Lemmy project is still in pretty active development, clients need to keep up with that. I know they’re hobby projects and the devs have no obligation to work on it, but I can’t really trust an app that might break for good at the next Lemmy release.
Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah, I didn’t know about any of that. I don’t even know where to see that stuff.
Man, I really hope they keep it going eventually but I’ll just sink with the ship as long as possible, personally. Probably eventually jump to Jerboa to support the native app.
That’s very understandable, people shouldn’t need to have deep technical knowledge to pick a social media app…
Anyway if you do want to see that stuff this is where: https://codeberg.org/Bazsalanszky/Eternity
Thanks! I’ll check that out.
I realize you probably don’t and that’s why you’re asking the original question here, but do you know of any apps that allow access to Hexbear emojis in the UI?
Jerboa for me. I like the UX better than anything else. I switch to Firefox to post emoji. It’s a pain in the ass, but it works.
abandon the app ideology and just use firefox + install pwa for all the sites. Get the benefit of a sandbox browser + can use adblock extension in firefox.
I just don’t like the default mobile UI tbh, it’s not nearly as pleasant to use as the most basic native app. Images not showing in the feed is already a big drawback by itself. I use it for posting sometimes because of the emoji picker, but otherwise I just don’t see the point of it. A native app is kinda sandboxed by definition, Hexbear doesn’t have ads (lmao, imagine), and any link opens in Fennec where I do have uBlock anyway…
Is there another web frontend I’m not aware of that’s significantly better for mobile?
Edit: also, jokes aside, I don’t get the point of this hostility towards native apps, at least for stuff I use regularly. The mobile UX is still shite for like half of all websites, including big corporate ones, why wouldn’t I use a better native UI instead?
native apps have access to the OS and can get stuff like location, messages, etc (if you allow permission, sometimes even without) and can also inject ads.
What do you mean by images not showing in the feed? They work normally for me i think?
Newer versions of Android are fairly well locked down in terms of permissions and access to personal that, and that’s just because Google wants apps to use its own proprietary APIs to do it, like the Advertising ID. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of difference between the tracking a website can do through Firefox mobile and the tracking a native app can do. Also Firefox mobile AFAIK still hasn’t implemented full site containers, so potentially there’s the extra risk of cross-site tracking.
For images I was just being lazy, I checked the settings and there’s the “auto expand media” option which does show the full images. It still doesn’t look great to me compared to native apps though.
Theres lots of speculation that apps like facebook listen in on the mic even without permission. I dunno how true that is, but a browser app absolutely cannot do that.
Yeah I’ve heard that, but I don’t really buy it. It would be a massive vulnerability that Google would have every interest in patching. They’re good at security when they want to be, and they definitely don’t want to give their direct competitor any data for free. The more likely option is that people simply give Facebook permission to use the mic, for stuff like voice messages, and Facebook abuses it. Plus we’re talking about open source hobbyist projects, not one of the biggest corpos in the world.
A web browser
Voyager
I use Voyager. The only thing I wish it had was display names (for pronouns) and normal-sized emoji.
I don’t care about pronouns, I wish it had the same swiping features as Reddit.
I care about pronouns. Its good to be respectful.
I don’t care about them at all. I call people what they want. I don’t care what people call me, I’m misgendered all the time and I never correct it because I think it’s funny.
firefox
I used to browse reddit with Boost and since moving to Lemmy I’ve tried a few of the apps but none really clicked with me until I tried Summit (Play Store link).
I had heard of it and not given it much thought, but looking at it now it might be the best looking one I’ve seen so far. Shame that it’s not open source though. Sync is closed source as well to be fair, but I’d rather not switch to another closed source one.
Firefox
