Yes! We will continue using TestFlight to try out our beta features, so if you want the cutting (and maybe buggy) edge of our development, stay on there. If you just want the stable, reliable app, the App Store version is your friend.
It's coming! We merged it into our dev codebase early this morning, so if it passes our internal testing it'll be out soon. We're currently sitting in App Store review, so the next build won't be out until that clears, but once we're over that hurdle we've got a whole slate of much-needed improvements planned.
We're working on a shiny image viewer--it's been slow because it's tightly bound to our image handling, which we've been tinkering with a lot to make the feed nice and smooth. It's slated for the next major update, though, so stay tuned!
We're working on it--it's been a bit slow because saving pictures and a detail image viewer is very closely tied to how we handle images, which we've been playing around with a lot to get the feed to scroll more smoothly. Picture saving and detail viewing should be out in the next major build.
Down the road we’re looking at integration with standard video hosting sites to let them play inline nicely. The primary challenge isn’t technical but financial: most of those APIs cost money, and the project doesn’t have any. We have to have some discussions about how we want to offer features like that (and push notifications, which also cost money to run) without compromising our ideal of being a donation-driven project—we need to avoid suddenly ending up in the hole for money that we don’t have. Once we’ve decided on an approach, though, we’ll definitely be set up to provide a seamless dog video browsing experience :)
To both: it's in the works. We're constantly optimizing our image preloading, which is the primary driver of the smoothness of the feed--we've got a really nice implementation that's way smoother coming down the pipeline soon.
As to the thumbnails, we've been getting a ton of feedback asking for various customizations like that, so we're bumping all the "easy win" customizability up--the next update we put out should have the option to swap thumbnail side, plus some other high-demand toggles
We're still finalizing the post and comment layouts--the time alone in the middle was a funky choice that we're definitely not sticking with. Buttons are going to stay primary because the user can interact with them, but we're working on more customization options so you can only see the information you want.
We try to avoid disabling native behavior, but we do have a feature in the works to return to scroll position, so keep an eye out--probably coming in 1.1 or 1.2, we haven't nailed down the scoping of it yet
Not unless somebody wants to remake it. It's built using SwiftUI from the ground up, which isn't really portable. It is open source, though, so anybody is welcome to port it themselves :P
Gone but not forgotten! I can read all the deleted posts with my Mod Powers, and I've made sure to go through and catalog all the feature requests. IIRC yours was customizing swipe actions--we've got that scheduled for 1.2, though it's too far out to give a precise timeline.
We had to create a new TestFlight a couple weeks ago when the founder left the project. Our new one is full, but we're hoping to be on the App Store within a couple of weeks so stay tuned!
The app was originally created as a solo project. When Lemmy suddenly took off, the founder started looking for devs to help out, and several of us showed up; for personal reasons, the founder chose to back out shortly thereafter. The dev team has remained largely consistent since then, though we've gained a couple new contributors.
They're doing great work over there too! We saw they just launched--congrats to them!
For what it's worth, we don't like the drama either, and we're hoping that this will be the end of it and we can focus all our energies on what matters: updates!
Haha yeah it's definitely been a bit bumpy, but the core team works really well together and we're optimistic that it's smooth sailing from here on out. We're hoping our next release will restore some of that confidence--it's got some exciting features planned!
Yes! We will continue using TestFlight to try out our beta features, so if you want the cutting (and maybe buggy) edge of our development, stay on there. If you just want the stable, reliable app, the App Store version is your friend.