I was using Jerboa up until now and am now using Sync because I used it for Reddit.
…and that’s it. I don’t understand why this gets so much talk. There are so many options. Just use something. We all want Lemmy to grow so I don’t see the problem.
This. I’ve been using Jerboa ever since making the switch to Lemmy. There wasn’t much of a learning curve and it basically does what I want, so I’m happy with it.
Me too, I have no idea where the complaints about Jerboa are coming from. I mean, it shows posts and comments, how radically different are these alternate apps? They all look the same to me!
I started off using jerboa. Just installed sync to see what the fuss is about. At the core it’s pretty much the same. One thing sync does better, at least on my phone, is smoother loading/rendering of content. There were times id actually use Lemmy web instead.
With that said, my favorite reddit app Boost, is working on a Lemmy client too. So I’m looking forward to that as well.
Am I ditching jerboa? No, not yet.
I put this in a other thread, but am genuinely interested in getting feedback.
I’m currently on Jerboa and downloaded/installed sync yesterday. As a former RIF user, I don’t have a horse in this race. I am more familiar with Jerboa, but find the overall feel of both (admittedly, without a lot of use), to be pretty comparable.
That said, I kind of like some of the ideas in Jerboa more? For example, tap to minimize comments and their children on Jerboa is quite a bit faster. I’m kind of sad that both make selecting some of the text in a comment hard and miss the dedicated RIF collapse/expand comment tree button. Jerboa also matches the font size of everything else in my UI better than Sync. For example, the font size of this reply and my keyboard are the same in Jerboa. In Sync the in-app font size is quite a bit smaller.
At the end of the day, I think that both apps are going to be largely comparable for a fairly casual user like me. I bet both offer more functionality than I’m using, but so far I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
You can customize both those options in Sync. I had the same initial issues, but you can switch comment collapse to single tap as well as increase font size.
Sync is very very customizable.
As a former RIF user I like the way the comments look on synch better. Reminds me or RiF
I am exactly your use-case. Was using RIF, then I’ve been using Jerboa up until Sync was released. I never used Sync for Reddit.
My opinion on the two differs from yours, however. Sync seems SO much better than Jerboa to me. Yep, the font was small but I was able to embiggen it. Everything else seems faster and more intuitive. Jerboa was so buggy for me.
Jerboa was a bit buggy initially, but the only bug I’ve experienced recently was trying to expand hidden comments in a post with a ton of comments. That caused it to crash. It is slow to load some days, but I’ve been caulking that up to a slow instance. I could see how an app could work around that problem by not loading the slow instance but that seems… non ideal? Better CX sure, but it means different users would see different content based on what app they’re using.
Another killer features Sync has that (AFAIK) no other Lemmy android apps currently have:
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long pressing a community in the community list drawers will open that community in a new activity windows, essentially the android equivalent to open in a new “window”. Use your phone’s app switcher to switch between these “window”. There is even an option to allow you to open posts in a new window as well. Very handy if you want to write a comment while looking for some information in another thread, or if you’re on a tablet and want to pin multiple sync windows on the screen.
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Sync will open links to a lemmy post natively instead of in an embedded web browser. Basically solve one of the most complained issue about linking in Lemmy.
I’ve tried a few apps (Liftoff, Wifwif or whatever it was called, and now Sync). I’ve not stuck with any of them, despite the fact I used RiF and later Boost both for years.
They just feel too early stage. Eg, Wifwif was super sluggish and I accidentally cancelled multiple long comments I typed up by trying to scroll, which is a big oof. With Sync, I noticed the comment hierarchy was messed up and when I went to post about that, I couldn’t do it from within the app because posting isn’t supported yet (feels like a big thing to be missing).
So for now, I’m still just using the website. And not with the PWA, because support for multiple tabs is really great and avoids weirdness with scrolling when going back.
Side note: why do literally no apps support tabs??? Number zero feature request I’ve ever had, for every single app. I even noticed that Sync has a long press to open posts in background, but it’s only for posts and it is rather convoluted cause it’s more like opening a second instance of the app. The back button goes to my Android home screen (not back to Sync) and it is hard to navigate to what you just opened.
Mobile Chrome’s tab groups feature is absolutely amazing. I hate using “normal” tabs anymore, cause the tab groups having the tabs accessible at the bottom of the screen is unbeatable.
Most of us were like that, but the sudden excitement we all had for the app release caused a counter-surge of people annoyed at our excitement and sometimes exaggerated statememts, which caused a lot of us to dig in our heels against the backlash in defence.
Add to that a user base used to no ads and no fees, with a user base who is okay with either, you’ve got the perfect ingredients for the mud soup we’ve found ourselves in.
