As an alternative, there's also Native Alpha and Hermit (my personal favorite) on Android. Play with the settings to make it full screen and frameless (no address bar at the top). It also has pull down to refresh.
On kbin, you can then go to your settings and sticky the navbar as well so that it's always at the top as you browse. Personal preference and all that.
I tried Hermit before, assumed these features will be locked in premium and didn't try it more, thank you!
Any idea why it changed my top bar color to gray while the icons (wifi, etc) are black? It's not a dealbreaker but it would be nice if there's a solution I'm missing.
Surprisingly, those particular features aren't locked behind premium. As for the top bar color, you might be able to change the theme in Lemmy/kbin itself in your profile settings to one that suits what you're looking for. Unless you mean in Hermit itself. In that case, I'm not sure - I use it frameless.
Just keep in mind that it uses your system's WebView. If you're not rooted/don't have a custom ROM, that's likely going to be Google's proprietary version of Chrome.
I just tried installing kbin as described in the post and downloading Hermit and I'm not really seeing a difference between the two options. Am I just missing something?
Personal preferences. I like to keep my stuff self-contained. This keeps browsing in the Hermit environment for that PWA rather than in your browser. You aren't really missing anything though. It might just not suit your needs and be redundant.
This is on kbin. Username in the upper right, Settings, scroll down through the stuff there and stop when you see the Delete Account button. Look for the small cog and click it. Turn on the option to sticky navbar - you may want to toggle infinite scrolling and maybe the show icons options while there as well.
Infinite scrolling not being default makes sense IMO. It's a highly addictive feature, and a bit part of these open source, federated communities is they try to avoid the addictiveness that big tech platforms try to enforce onto their users if possible.
Sometimes the feature is highly liked by people, so they add it as a non-default option.
I tried Hermit and noticed that Voyager doesn’t automatically switch between Dark and Light theme (in the night / morning). Workaround is to kill (force close) the app and open it again.
Do you also face this issue? I can’t remember if with Chrome I was facing it…
It saved my sessions in Hermit, so I don’t think I had that issue. But I definitely had that issue when using Brave with it not saving my settings/session between loads.
For what it’s worth, Native Alpha is also open source. I found that out after the fact. So if that’s something you value, Native Alpha might be the better choice overall. Hope it serves you well!
Yes and it also works out of the box for (I haven’t had to change any setting…). For example in the other app I had to configure some stuff to hide the top URL bar or something similar.
Here I just added wefwef url app, I created the icon and voilà!
I'd like to add that for Android users installing Kbin, if you can't find the app anywhere, it's listed as "/kbin" at the bottom of your app drawer because of the backslash. Lemmy users will find it sorted under "L".
I can’t get this to work with either Chrome or Firefox on my Galaxy S22 and instance on 0.18. With FF, it crashes on open, and with chrome it locks the UI up.
Did that with lemmy, but at least in my case it just happens too often that I get an infinite loading circle when switching threads and then I have to reload the entire page, which isn't possible when not in the real browser. Even closing the web app and reopening them doesn't help but once I open the page in Safari it works just fine.
Mlem for iOS just got an update which gives us the compact thread style I much prefer over the current web app look but it seems like I can't edit comments there and I also don't see any notifications so there's still a lot of work to be done before it becomes an option.
And kbin I just don't use on the phone at all as long as we can't collapse comment chains.
I find that jerboa has some missing features that are there in the web app. Things like being able to go from a comment in your inbox to that same comment in context in it's thread.
Edit: I lied, it's not directly from my inbox. NVM. I go to the commenter's comments and go to the context from there. The comment is usually first or second on their list, so it's not hard to find. But yeah, extra steps. I wish I could reply from the inbox in general.
Thanks! Right now I am willing to give devs all kinds of slack on what features they offer. They have their hands full with the massive growth the last couple weeks, and I am perfectly happy waiting.
Mybe I will try to add that feature to the app tomorrow if no other contributer hasn't already. Development of the app seems to move quite fast and a bunch of people are adding stuff. But I agree, there are still a lot of smaller and bigger things missing or wonky.
Actually I ran a current development build of the app which seems to have the feature already. There is a small chain icon next to the vote arrows which jumps to the comment and it's parent and allows to load even more context. So maybe it will ship in the next app update when release :)
Have you written for the app before? How did yiu find it? I took a very quick look and plan to try working on it at some point but I don't know kotlin at all. It'll take some spinup for me.
Yes, I made two small contributions till now. The maintainers seem pretty responsive when new PRs are opened and open to the stuff people are adding. Did not have a thorough look through all the code of the app yet but what I have seen seems structured quite good and I look forward to working more with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Am a Java Dev for work, quite some time since I last worked on an Android App but making small contributions first should get you started
I'll give it a shot as I have time. I'm primarily a Python developer with experience in Go, C, and a smattering of other languages. Should be easy enough to learn enough to contribute some small PRs.
I'm primarily using the pwa for now. Jerboa has a nicer UI in most cases, but pwa is a lot smoother, less buggy, and external links open up a lot faster. Also, jerboa has a bunch of minor annyonaces, like trying to select text and it keeps minimizing the comment instead, or how it opens Lemmy links in an external browser.
A bit more devtime and I'll switch to it, especially if they add a feature to group multiple communities in a single entry.
I’ve just been using Lemmy in PWA mode on my iPad and have switched back to viewing it in a normal browser. The lack of a back button was too annoying. 😄
This is what has been bothering me! Every time I’m done reading a post and want to go back to my feed, I press the home logo in the top left and it takes me back to the top of the feed. I want a back button that keeps the position to which I had scrolled before opening a post.
PWAs only work on Chromium web browsers, though there are some that install on Firefox on Mobile. Yes, I can jsut use Brave, but it's syncing is awful and I bet there are old accounts of mine floating with an expired passphrase. Granted, I now save my bookmarks, passwords etc. in various other places where I can access them from any device anywere.
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