I've been in several apps's TestFlight for a couple of weeks. The author of Memmy has so much energy to work on their app, I think it's the most likely to reach production soon. Mlem is a close second, with a closer feel to Apolo, the others (Thunder and Liftoff!) are still alpha quality for now.
People should stop praising "an actual app" as an advantage.
There is nothing in functionality that a good PWA can't do well for a Lemmy client. It's cross platform and can be used in the browser of your choice, without the lock-in to a single app store.
People are coming from a closed system like Reddit because Reddit abused it's power and now they're asking for apps in a store where another company might do the same. I don't get it.
You’re right — PWAs can be feature rich and versatile. I’m glad they exist.
However, as much as I like wefwef (especially coming from Apollo), I don’t like having the URL bar perpetually taking up real estate like it does on iOS. I’m also much less likely to trigger browser-specific functions if I’m using a dedicated app.
Assuming the Lemmy platform remains open, I don’t have any issue supporting a developer for making a great app for it.
The issue with Reddit is not that devs were making third-party apps for it… it’s with the people running the platform.
I keep those apps installed to keep track of their advancement, because I usually prefer using native apps, but they are not ready yet and WefWef is just so great and works so well it’s hard to believe it’s a webapp
I have constantly praised how good PWAs are and get constant pushback because "web apps suck", when the reality is just that most web apps that people have used have sucked, but they don't inherently if they're well written.
PWAs are truly a beautiful app distribution model. They just use standard web browser APIs so they should work on every platform with a web browser, which means they also works with your favourite browser extensions, screen readers, and accessibility devices; they're securely sandboxed away from the OS through those APIs; they updates themselves seamlessly to the latest version with just a page refresh; and distribution literally just requires you to self host a web site for free on something like GitHub Pages, no app stores or signing certificates or anything.
I tried it, but for some reason I can’t stand the fake iOS interface. It just feels cheap or something, I like kbin as a PWA much more. For the record, I use an iPhone and I do like actual iOS