unpopular opinion: i dont like the reliance on lemmy third party apps
you're gonna have to hear me out on this one.
so, we all obviously know reddit had a lot of third party apps, due to how bad the official reddit app was.
but heres the thing, right? this isn't reddit. this is a federated alternative, where the owners arent just corporate shills who dont have to care about making a usable app. i appreciate all of the options, dont get me wrong, and i appreciate the tons of effort put into them. but...will lemmy ever be accessable if you have to look up lists of apps to even browse it on mobile?
it makes no sense to me. i think what the lemmy developers should be doing is working on or improving a mobile app; again, this is not reddit, and nobody has to deal with a bad mobile app because all of the people who work on the project are under the whims of a corporate product with over, like, 100 million daily users.
i appreciate the options a lot. i really do. but if the culture of 'go on a separate app to browse on mobile' persists for lemmy, which is way smaller and prone to skepticism, not to mention federation being confusing at first and its poor user joining page (join-lemmy.org), all the reliance on getting other people to make mobile apps does is throttle site growth, in my opinion.
It doesn't hurt lemmy to have other options for mobile apps. It's like a phone case. It doesn't affect how the phone works, you just picked yours because you like it and it's comfortable to use.
I could use the lemmy mobile site, but memmy has swipe gestures and themes and a much nicer UI, so it makes it much more pleasant to browse lemmy. It feels more intuitive.
You have a point, but remember that Lemmy is just an open source project with limited resources. they shouldn't even be thinking about an app until the platform is solid. They are focusing on scalability and essential functions right now. And not to mention, due to the nature of the platform any one of these apps could just become the official app
You're not wrong. But developers really like what they know. Not everyone wants to learn Rust and whatever UI layer Lemmy is using. But they want to contribute, and this is the easiest way for them to do so as a hobby project.
There's probably an argument to be made that different users want different things from the UI, which would be another reason for multiple apps.
Lemmy is never going to compete with Reddit regardless. It's way too complicated for the average user. I think it's a neat experience, but with the way it works, I don't think there's any world where it gets really big. I don't think it's even clear what Lemmy actually is.