Google requires a dozen or so beta testers before you are allowed to launch an app on the Play store publicly. Given that this community lives on Lemmy, and it’s full of Android users, I was hoping I could recruit a few people.
My app, “Blorp”, is already listed on the official Lemmy website for iOS, but Android has been delayed due to this requirement.
Would greatly appreciate your help, and if it turns out you like my app, I’m happy to make changes based on your feedback.
For closed testing, Google requires you join a linked Google Group before downing the app.
Step 1: Join the testing group
🔗 https://groups.google.com/g/blorp-android-app-testers
Step 2: Download the app
📱 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.blorpblorp.app
Thanks in advance!
Edit: there’s also a Lemmy community if you want to stay up to date or ask questions !blorp@lemmy.ml
It’s on Jerboa. It’s on Thunder. It’s on Interstellar, You can get it on Eternity. It’s on Voyager. It’s on Raccoon. It’s on Blorp. Download Blorp it’s on there. Download Blorp.
Going to try out your app. Thunder is tough competition, though.
You’ll probably find a lot of Lemmy users do not use Google accounts and won’t be interested in joining a google group or installing via Play Store. Do you have an alternative method for installation?
Not yet, but you’re not the first person to ask. I’m also not a fan of the Google Group thing. Unfortunately Google requires I conduct a few weeks of closed testing before I get access to the play store. The only way to run closed tests it to add people by email or via Google Group. Once access is unlocked, then you can install via Play Store like normal.
I’m still operating under the assumption that more Android Lemmy users install via Play Store than other Android stores, but I could totally be wrong. I imagine it skews by community, For example, I’m sure if you ask one of the privacy communities they would tend to avoid mainstream stores.
It would be interesting to pick a more general purpose community (maybe ask lemmy community) and ask people what platforms they use. I also imagine some of the other apps like Voyager may have a better idea since they have a substantial amount of users across multiple platforms.
But I guess my TL;DR is what you’re saying makes sense, but it’s always better to conduct some research than assume you understand how someone uses your app. Genuinely I would be curious what a larger pull of Lemmy users would reveal.but it’s always better to conduct some research than assume you understand how someone uses your app
You can create a community here to conduct research, as aeharding (Voyager) has done.
Ok, I ran a very not scientific poll. Of 55 Android users, 33 said they use F-Droid to get their Lemmy app of choice, and 22 said they use Google Play.
I would still say Google Play is significant enough that I want to distribute there, but I’m genuinely surprised F-Droid is so popular here. I stand corrected, and there’s a good chance you’re right that F-Droid is more popular here than Google Play.
I’m going to keep an eye on the poll as more votes roll in, but it seems to be moving at a fairly consistent ratio of 3:2 F-Droid to Play Store.
hey, trying your app out. it’s pretty neat, but is there a way to have a more compact post view?
yeah i think putting the com name and the up/downvotes on the same line would fill some of the dead space between posts
Thanks for the feedback! Could you both share some screenshots demonstating what you are thinking? Or even a napkin sketch. Just something to help me visualize. Either here or on GitHub issues.
here’s the deadspace i was noticing:
here’s a potential way to make it more compact:
the com@inst 🗨️1🔼2🔽 line could either go above or below the post (ive seen moth on lemmy clients)
Done! I like the look of it, the black is great for oled. I’m pretty committed to boost, but I’ll give blorp a good try, and it is already making me resent the charcoal theming in boost…
Update: Is there a way to include the community and post title when I see my posts and comments in my Profile? When I go to Inbox I see all the replies to my stuff, and the context. But when I look at my profile it’s just a wall of text seperate with some lines, no indication of community, upvotes, whether it’s a post or a comment. If I use the filter tap for Posts, it’s much like what I’d expect with communities and votes, but the Comments tab is also a wall of text with no details.
For me, that’s a big downside as I often go back to old threads I’ve contributed to because I want to see if there’s been other replies or to find a interesting point someone made.
Yeah I gotta fix that. I’ll probably look at the layout voyager uses for inspiration, but feel free to attach screenshots of other apps if there are any designs you like specifically.
I also want to improve the saved page. Saved should be searchable imo.
Would love to look into this. Was looking for a new app just the other day! Im currently on Raccoon but looking for something else. Ill bookmark this post for now 🙏
My goal is to launch a unified Lemmy experience across web, desktop, mobile and tablet. I’m also pretty confident my multi account switching experience is better than most Lemmy clients. Though I don’t have time to test every single one.
Lol same here let me know if you find anything good!
why wouldn’t you <s>make it FOSS and</s> release it through fDroid?
https://github.com/christianjuth/blorp
It’s GPL-3.0 licensed, so it is FOSS. They’re just trying to get it on the Google Play Store.
My time is limited, but I would love to get it everywhere including a Linux desktop app. I’m happy to look into fDroid. It’s really that if I have an hour to spend coding, I have to prioritize the task that will benefit the most users. Right now I’m very deep into solving Lemmy V1 support and PieFed support. That will likely take a couple months.
Feedback from frequent users makes a big difference. If someone that uses my app every day asks for a feature consistently, it’s much easier for me to justify the time spent working on that feature.
Also, in addition to FOSS, there is no data collected at all. The only communication the app has is with the lemmy server you select, or the default instance (Lemmy.zip) when you launch the app for the first time. MacOS will also ping GitHub releases for updates.
oh wow, the web app looks great. always thought lemmy looked pretty bad from every desktop ui ive found
Thank you! That’s is honestly what sent me on this mission. Let me know if you have any feature requests! Either on GitHub, comment, or DM
thanks for the link
Out of curiosity, what lemmy client did you use to add the strikethough? Or did you hand type it. As far as I know, Lemmy only supports strike throughs using ~~
Like thisAsking because I made a conscious decision to not support HTML within markdown, but I’m curious if other clients do. I mostly use the official Lemmy UI and Voyager to compare against.
hand typed. Old habits
i’ll try to use markdown
from now onOn Boost it inserts the markdown like so
Blahblah ::: spoiler spoiler blah ::: blah
Thank you for this app!
This is pretty nice so far! It’s scratching an itch left behind by the abandonment of Sync for Lemmy
I think the hitboxes on the account switcher need to be horizontally larger. Right now I have to carefully tap directly in the center of the tiny profile picture in order to switch
EDIT: Also, I’m hitting a bug where one account’s subs aren’t refreshed and reloaded when switching from one account to another. I need to force close the app and re-open to get it to refresh properly
That should be easy to fix. Though I’m looking at it, and I would guess sort and search would be a harder to hit target since they seem smaller.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear - I meant the actual separate accounts in the account sidebar, where it says “other accounts”
Great catch! I have a fix, but it might take me a couple days to cut a new release. Cutting a new release takes a bit of time, so it’s easier to batch a bunch of bug fixes all at once. Let me know if you see any other bugs and I’ll see if I can sneak them all into a release.
Btw, follow !blorp@lemmy.ml if you want to stay up to date
just installed. looks great so far!
Does Blorp support mod actions? I love Thunder but am trying out Summit as it has these
Not really yet. Maybe if you could make a list of which ones you want the most I can start there. Can’t make any promises as far as timeline, but my plan is to build a full featured client that runs cross platform.
That’d be great, thanks! The Reports page like the site would be as much as I’d want due to Lemmy’s own limited feature set currently, with tabs for unread/all, all/comments/posts
A big thing stopping me is I don’t really moderate any communities actively, so I’m not confident I know how mods use the site. But if you’re interested in testing and giving feedback, I’ll DM you when I start working on this.
All good, thanks for taking those features into consideration. I’m a mod on two communities but have only just been added to one, the other is very quiet i.e. I’ve not needed to do any modding
is there no compact layout?
No, but you’re the second person to ask that. I’ll work on adding one
Ive just downloaded and played with it a very little. Do you have an community put together yet so we can direct conversations and such to there? All the big name apps for lemmy do it and makes prioritizing things a little easier as the community votes on posts and such.
Is your app on a code repository such as github or codeberg? Because if it is then you could just have people download it directly from the source repository and get updates through Obtainium.
Fuck the Google Play Store.
https://github.com/christianjuth/blorp
One step at a time, but I love the idea! I only have so many hours so my plan is to get in on the app stores, then build out from there by supporting some of these more niche distribution methods.
Yeah, you do you, but I would not put my time or energy into the big tech app stores, especially not with something where the community understands the need for open source self-hostable software.
I fully agree with your distaste for big tech. That’s why I’m here and not Reddit. However, if I launch an app on mainstream stores, I might get a couple hundred users relatively easily. If I push to the more niche stores/distribution methods, I might get a couple or maybe a dozen users. It’s not that I don’t want to distribute on the niche stores, but I need to prioritize what will get real users. But my goal is to find a distribution method that makes everyone happy. For example, I have plans to distribute the web version of my app via Docker, but I know I’ll have a hard time getting people to pull a docker image. So I’ve deprioritized that for now. Same goes for PWA. I know I want to improve the PWA installation experience, but I know less people install a PWA on their home screen than app via App Store and Play Store.
That being said, the more people I have asking for a specific distribution method, the more likely I am to prioritize that. Unfortunately, every distribution method I add increase the friction for me to push new releases. I really want to be able to iterate quickly until Blorp matures, then as I find updates aren’t as frequent I will build out to more distribution methods.
All of this could change, especially if I found more people willing to contribute to the source code.
I’ll give it a shot. I’m running a Lemmy instance and (new!) a Piefed instance, I’ll try it with both!
PieFed unfortunately is going to take me a bit of time. But pretty high on my priorities rn.
