The way I see it, the mobile app ecosystem for PeerTube has yet to take off, in spite of the fact that it has a seemingly decent API. More people appear to be using the platform than ever before, which is great, but we still seem to be lacking a general ecosystem that Mastodon or even Lemmy has.
To my knowledge, these are the only apps I’ve ever found that work with PeerTube:
- Thorium: Supports video playback and sign-in, doesn’t support comments or replies or seemingly any social features?
- P2Play: Seems to support commenting, but abandoned 3 years ago or so.
- NewPipe: Actually pretty good as a player, but not really designed around the social API at all. Makes sense, given the app is more of a “download and play videos without an account” type of video app.
- FediLab: Supposedly supports PeerTube, actually seems like a featureful client, but I’ve always kind of felt iffy about whether a general multi-platform app could make for a good experience.
It just feels as though we’re lacking a quality mobile client for PeerTube, and I think it’s a missed opportunity. Do we currently now of any other efforts out there to build for the platform?
As a new peertube instance owner, I asked myself the same. I‘m not a huge programmer so I can’t tell you I‘ll do it but I think so too.
It doesn’t directly answer this need, but I think the reality is most viewers aren’t on PeerTube at all, they’re on Mastodon. And they’re using whatever Mastodon client to watch PeerTube videos. Some clients support direct viewing and others will just show up as a link taking them into the browser.
A dedicated app would be a gamechanger for a very very small number of people, but until that number grows and while everyone is just using other platforms to watch videos, I can understand why nobody’s gone to the effort.
Bill shock might be waiting for anyone silly enough to deep dive with peertube. And website hosts don’t usually play nice when you want to start streaming media. I can see why a lot of people aren’t jumping in with both feet.
You have to remember that YouTube has a gigantic corporation to back it. A lot of platforms tend to lean heavily on YouTube for content.
I think it’s a case of waiting for another expansion in the Fediverse to make it all worthwhile. Otherwise, the app you develop could suddenly find itself disconnected from any instances willing to stream a large volume of content.
I might be wrong, but that’s what I considered when thinking about contributing.
Framatube has an official PeerTube app on their roadmap for 2024.
