For me I disagree. I don't think apps built on top of the Fediverse/Lemmy/Kbin need to be FOSS. If that's what you want personally more power to you, but I don't it's good to speak negatively towards those who would make another choice ("Imagine using...").
I think having non open source apps built on top of open source services is totally fine. I might still choose to use an open source app if all else was equal, but I don't think an app needs to be. Ivory for Mastodon for instance is a great app but not open source. I don't think I or anyone needs to hold themselves back from using a good app for the Fediverse just because it's not also open source. And Ivory's existenance has IMO benefited the Mastodon ecosystem.
There's overhead and responsibility as well when making an app open source, or they need to be more careful about code, or it limits what libraries they can use. I don't blame devs for not making their projects FOSS depending on their context. Or maybe they start it closed and then move to open source eventually, which I think is what Artemis (app in development) is doing for now because they don't want to deal with the challenges of open sourcing yet and want to focus on development.
Let a thousand clients and approaches bloom IMO. We don't need to be dogmatic about this. It's amazing that these systems are FOSS, but I don't think the whole ecosystem needs to or should be necessarily. If you want to use FOSS clients though that's cool, and if devs build open source or FOSS clients that's great, but we don't need to judge those who choose differently or develop them.
The problem is, from what I know, that there's no full API documentation for Kbin available yet, so an app for Kbin is not possible to make now. Yeah, the option would be to create it for Lemmy and then just federate with Kbin.
The Sync community turned toxic when the dev implemented an updated UI a couple years ago. The new UI was beautiful and much more in line with the evolving visual design of Android, but the average user hates change. The dev version spent a while on the new UI while it was being refined, but the free/pro version was not upgraded until I want to say probably a year or more later, the developer having gone radio silent for a while under all the criticism.
One leads to another imo. More users in the fediverse more demand for apps and more attention for devs. There’s also lemon which is being made for both, I believe.
Honestly out of all the android apps sync was the best one. I tried Boost, RedditIsFun,koala and a bunch more but sync had the best extra features and look.
I hopped around a lot before landing on Baconreader and, later, Sync. I don't mind doing that again - but Sync might be where I end up staying if he's quick. That said, I think Jerboa is actually rather nice and similar as it stands (at least for how I used Sync). Many of the things I want are on the Lemmy side as a whole, not necessarily the app side of it.
Jerboa has some problems it needs to polish (although a lot of issues I have look like they've been resolved in PR's on the github page, ready for next release) but as an open source app for a previously tiny userbase, it does the job. Would switch over to Sync in a heartbeat though, if as you say, he's quick.
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