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
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.
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.
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.