cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4709002
Hi everyone!
It’s been quite the journey, but Avelon is finally on the App Store!
Click here to download!
The app is includes a lot of awesome features requested by the community, including:
- Sleek design that fits right in on iOS & iPadOS
- Highly customizable look & behavior
- Mark read on scroll & hide read posts
- Customizable swipe gestures
- Multiple account support
- Smart link previews in posts and comments
- Support for videos, gifs, photos & other media
- Custom font support
- Write replies with markdown highlighting
- Privacy focused - the app has no tracking of any kind
- Gallery mode + hide bars on scroll = full immersion … and a lot more!
Screenshots
Here’s some cool app store screenshots of the app:
Developing this app has been one of the best development experiences I’ve had, and I feel very privileged and happy to have been able to contribute to Lemmy in this way. Nothing is more motivating than seeing so many people already enjoying the app and providing suggestions and feedback.
I really hope you enjoy Avelon, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about what everyone thinks. Keep the feedback coming!
Thank you, Sigve Rokenes
oh, it also requires ios 16. staying with memmy and thunder for now. maybe in the future.
edit: im using an ogse and not planning to buy a new phone soon. dumbasses.
Thanks for the heads up
Cries in dopamine
I’m not willing to try any Lemmy app that is locked to the latest iOS only (mlem, lemmios, now avelon).
I see it as a red flag that devs are just experimenting with the latest APIs and not committed to long term support & stability. What about when iOS 17 comes out? are these devs gonna require it because they want to test whatever shiny new thing Apple does?
Seems like a pain for users tbh when iOS is quite buggy on new releases, and alienates ppl who are jailbroken or have old devices. No stable software behaves like that, so these apps feel like an experiment that will soon be canned.
an iOS dev explained to me in a separate post that supporting older iOSes significantly limits the Swift features they can use. meaning supporting iOSes requires more work. that is why for apps with a small dev team, they would start with the latest iOS.
this makes me appreciate the apps that do not let older devices get left behind. was interested to try Avelon, unfortunately it is limited to the newest OS.
weird though that people are quick to downvote (see that before the edit, nothing offensive was said) instead of making an explanation. again, i got the explanation from a different post.
Yeah, SwiftUI is still immature in many areas, so each new version adds a lot of essential features. I’m not talking fancy new things, just the basic stuff that almost every app needs. The alternative is to implement through the older UIkit which is slower to do, especially for people like me who don’t really know UIkit from before.
As for Avelon I’m using a few key features introduced with v16. Since I’m just one dev I prioritized polish and features over supporting older versions which would take much more time. Yeah, it sucks if you’re stuck on iOS 15, but that’s just what I decided to prioritize.
i completely understand that you are prioritizing maximum impact for the effort you put in. thank you for your work - will definitely try Avelon someday when i get that new phone.
Also, as the developer of Lemmios, it is somewhat negligence on my part (not saying this is true for any of the other app developers, just me), we all google when we code and generally the newer features make things much easier so it is really hard to google older features since they are harder to implement and get quite buried. I also think for me at least my apps start as passion projects I don’t really expect anyone to use so I forget that iOS versions under my current one exist lol, it’s a lot easier to start on 16.0 and stay on 16.0 forever than go lower after the project has started, sorry.
thank you for your work and for providing more insight about ios app development. i understand that this is simply a matter of practicality.
it is good to see all these new apps for the fediverse; hope to try yours someday.