Now that 0.19 is in testing on a couple of servers we’re faced with the reality that Liftoff is probably not going to be functional for much longer. So I’m curious what everyone’s got planned.

Personally I’ve got my eye on !raccoonforlemmy@lemmy.world which is currently under development but looks like it might be the closest to my ideal. Developer describes it thusly:

I liked the feature richness of Liftoff (e.g. the possibility to explore all the communities of an external instance), the multi-community feature of Summit and the polished UI of Thunder and I wished I could have them all in the same app.

It’s currently very promising, but also very buggy so I’m hopeful it might be in a more usable state by the time 0.19 starts majorly rolling out. We shall see. The dev put out a call for testers a couple days ago but I’m sure more wouldn’t hurt if anyone wants to give it a whirl.

I’ve tried most of the main Android options by this point, Summit gets the most use just because of multi-communities (great for sports and other happening-right-now events) but I’m really not a fan of its interface.

Boost looks nice and simple, but I find a lot of the features to be just straight-up broken.

Sync and Eternity both put me off with their looks even though they look totally different to each other!

Connect would probably be my second choice so far, but I’d still need to keep Summit around for the multi-communities which is a bit annoying.

That’s about the extent of my investigations at this point. Would love to hear which you’ve tried and what you like / dislike from the point of view of a Liftoff user. Let’s get some recommendations ironed out before everything breaks and this group is overrun with people asking why 😅

  • TeaHands@lemmy.worldOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    7 months ago

    Oh interesting, last time I did a proper trawl was when everything was on fire and the devs were almost begging people to stop using Jerboa so they could concentrate on Lemmy core. Will have to check out the changes since my knowledge is clearly out of date, cheers.

  • slice@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    38
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    7 months ago

    I’m using voyager. And happy with it. Just wanted to at it to the list

  • doeknius_gloek@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    I really love Boost and haven’t noticed broken features. It was a Reddit client before, so it’s already really polished and offers, in my experience, a great UX.

    The only downside I see is that it isn’t open source, but I don’t care for now.

    I also used Voyager for a while and it’s really good too.

    • TeaHands@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      7 months ago

      Maybe it’s something wrong with my account. For example I’m logged in, I go to browse All or Local, and bam! Full of communities I already have blocked. And trying to block them again through Boost itself seems to do nothing either. It’s weird.

      • doeknius_gloek@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        7 months ago

        I think this is a side effect of the 0.19 release. I could reproduce your issue with an account on a 0.19 instance, but not on 0.18.5. This will probably get fixed after some time.

        • TeaHands@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          7 months ago

          Huh, interesting! We’re definitely still on 0.18.5 here but I expect having to cater to both versions at once is probably causing all kinds of obscure bugs. Good to know it normally works ok, though :D

  • TheLameSauce@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    7 months ago

    I switched to Sync a while back cause Liftoff just wasn’t working the way I wanted it to and have been pretty happy with it. The layout is pretty customizable so it might be worth giving it another chance and seeing if you can play around with it enough to get it where you like.

    • TeaHands@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      7 months ago

      Yeah I fiddled with it a fair bit when it first came out, there’s nothing hugely wrong with it it just doesn’t “feel” right, you know? I think given that I was a RiF and then Liftoff user, maybe my brain craves a bit of jank lol

    • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      7 months ago

      Check out Lemma too. Pretty good so far and progress is being made. It also has the best app icon of any of them.

  • med@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    7 months ago

    I switched to Thunder. It’s not perfect (search could use some work).

    It doesn’t reload my main feed everytime I return after looking at an article, and lets me hid posts I’ve ‘read’. ¯_(ツ)_/¯. It supports amoled black themes, swipe gestures and is reasonably unobtrusive.

    Also, it’s cross platform for iOS and android, and I switch back and forth on a daily basis.

    • AwwTopsy@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      7 months ago

      Thunder has been decent in my experience as well. I just wish the icon was nicer… Not even sure what it’s supposed to be? An S? No idea

  • illi@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    7 months ago

    Eternity is so far the second best app I’ve found, after Liftoff ofc

    • weker01@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      7 months ago

      I think I’ll also settle for eternity. It does feel different than liftoff and rif but not impossible to get used to.

    • Aa!@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      7 months ago

      I’m from RIF, I use Voyager with compact mode and disabled gestures. It’s exactly what I was looking for

    • TeaHands@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      7 months ago

      That’s why I picked it too. Hoping Raccoon can fill the gap with a bit more development time 🤞

  • FelipeFelop@discuss.online
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    7 months ago

    It looks like v0.19 has been released, so over the next days instances will update. So unless there’s a sudden new compatible version, we’re at the end of Liftoff!

    • FelipeFelop@discuss.online
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      7 months ago

      Just to add that when an instance upgrades to v0.19 all logins are invalidated. So you’ll need to log back in. So it would be good to choose your new app before that happens.

  • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    7 months ago

    This is just sad tbh, I wish we didn’t have to give up. But once lemmy.world upgrades, won’t have a choice.

    Jumped here from voyager when it first came out, too buggy for my liking.

    • TeaHands@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      7 months ago

      It is disappointing. But at least we have a lot of options!

      Was kind of hoping people might reply to this thread with more actual reasoning for their faves, from the pov of us all enjoying Liftoff and wanting to find the next best thing. But it’s pretty much just turned into a list of all the apps, whoops!

      • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        7 months ago

        Well, I’m typing this on voyager now, original comment was liftoff.

        Feels different, it works but somehow it feels more sluggish in terms of processing network requests.

        Dunno man, liftoff just felt lean and mean. I’ll definitely switch back once it gets developed again.