Recently hopped over to Lemmy from Reddit, initially tried Boost and the web app and wasn’t super happy with the experience however after installing Singing I can happily say the experience has improved vastly. It feels more promising and premium than the actual official Reddit app!

    • CrayonRosary@lemmy.world
      0·
      9 months ago

      You must be kidding me. Voyager is a joke compared to Sync.

      1. Voyager has horrible micro stuttering when trying to scroll. Especially when scrolling posts, but I’ve seen it on comments too. Whether flick panning or slowly scrolling down. And I have a blazing fast phone. (Pixel 7 Pro). Sync is buttery smooth. I don’t think Voyager is a native Android app.
      2. Compact mode is super cluttered and hard to read.
        1. It’s numbericonnumbericonnumbericon all squished together. Sync uses the same amount of space in it’s compact mode and makes everything clear.
        2. For some reason you can use the normal, large voting buttons, or click on the microscopic vote totals to vote. I’m trying to view the comments, but I vote on a post instead.
        3. The three-dot icon is 1/6th the width of my pinky nail, and I have a giant phone! Why is it so tiny?
      3. There’s no way to quickly peek at a large version of a thumbnail on a link post. You can open the comments to larger version, though. Sync let’s you long press a thumbnail to peek at it full screen. It turns out I use this feature a lot and don’t want to wait for comments to load to look closely at a link thumbnail.
      4. The three-dot menu on a post doesn’t have 1/2 the features of Sync’s menu. Sync shows additional submenus for the user and community for blocking, viewing their home instance, their profile, and other things.
      5. You can’t disable swiping an image to close it causing me to dismiss images by accident. Sync had a setting to disable this. I prefer to use only the Android back button to close an image.
      6. Sync has a million settings to customize everything, and long-pressing a setting will copy a shortcut which you can share with other Sync users to help them jump right to that setting with one tap. The settings shortcuts, when pasted into a comment, appear as graphics to other Sync users showing the setting name and making it obvious it’s a shortcut to it.
      7. In Sync, the top and bottom bars hide when scrolling and reappear if you scroll back up a small amount, saving screen real estate.
      8. Sync has a comment draft system so you can save a comment to work on later. It’s great for high effort comments. It also automatically saves a draft the instant you try to post something in case the submission fails for any reason, and deletes the draft automatically if it submits successfully.
      9. Sync has built-in filters. You can choose to save a client-side filter for a user, community, or instance, or create a server-side block. And you can create keyword filters allowing you to filter stuff like Elon Musk spam.
      10. Sync has special options for tablets and other widescreen devices.
      11. Sync can edit your core Lemmy account options so you don’t need to use the website to do that.
      12. The comment navigator goes both down and up and has other features, too.

      I could go on and on.

      That’s not to say Sync is perfect.

      1. Sync uses reddit style markdown instead of Lemmy style in some cases, and only other Sync users see the formatting properly. That’s fucking dumb. You can type the markdown manually, but it will change Lemmy style spoiler tags to reddit style when you edit a comment containing a Lemmy style spoiler.
      2. The app appears to be abandoned. The author hasn’t said a thing on the Discord in 4 months. Some apologists say this is “normal” for him, but it’s bullshit behavior to not say anything. Maybe he died or is in jail. Who knows. But there is a huge backlog of bugs.
      3. It has ads unless you pay $20. Considering how good the app is overall, it’s almost worth it, but to a lot of people it won’t be.

      I don’t really care what app people prefer, but Sync is like Photoshop compared to Voyager’s Paint.Net. I’m curious to see what objective things you could say about Voyager to make it seem superior. Even just in your own opinion.

      This comment was written in Voyager because I’ve been trying to give it a chance.

      • aeharding@lemmy.world
        0·
        8 months ago

        Hi thanks for the write up!

        1. This doesn’t happen on iOS, but should get more investigation

        2. I think this is a matter of opinion. I personally prefer the Voyager compact mode. But I am biased. ;) You can tap and hold to get to the ellipse menu. You can also disable the large vote buttons in settings for more tap space.

        3. You can block, view side bar etc by tap and hold on username/community name.

        4. I don’t think this has been requested yet as a feature on Github.

        5. That’s cool

        7 Planned :)

        1. Voyager has recovery in case of app crash, but doesn’t have a draft system.

        10 planned but not yet :)

        12, you can tap and hold to jump back up.

        14, you should see a warning if you hit back by accident. If the comment is empty there is no warning because there is nothing composed.

        15, you can set Voyager to open links in browser, instead of in-app

        16, this is being worked on :)

        • CrayonRosary@lemmy.world
          0·
          8 months ago

          Regarding #15. In didn’t tap a link in Voyager. I tapped “Share” and then chose the DuckDuckGo browser as the share target for the URL. I do this occasionally since it’s not my default browser and I use it for throwaway links I don’t want to clutter Firefox with.

          In every other app, not just Lemmy ones, it simply opens the browser as a new process and loads the URL. On the other hand, Voyager some how opens the browser as Voyager. When opening the recent apps list, I no longer see Voyager. I only see DuckDuckGo with the Voyager icon above it.

          Once the page is open, if I tap into a link on the page, then another, then another, I know have to hit Back 3 times to get back to Voyager.

          No other app does this.

    • GroteStreet 🦘@aussie.zoneEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      As much as I love Voyager, I’m a compact post list kind of guy. And nothing beats Sync’s post density and configurability.

      All I need is a title, the community it’s on, # of comments, and a small thumbnail. If I need anything else, I’ll click on the post.

      Why would I want an up/down vote button on a compact list? Who upvotes something just from the title??

      • aeharding@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        Other than hiding vote buttons, is there anything in particular that you’re looking for from Voyager’s compact mode?

        If you can make an issue on Github that would help too!

        Edit: you can hide vote buttons in compact mode :)

        • GroteStreet 🦘@aussie.zoneEnglish
          0·
          10 months ago

          Oh hey. Wasn’t expecting you to pop up! Yeah, sorry, my rant wasn’t specific to Voyager (in fact, thank you for being one of the few allowing hiding vote buttons). I actually use Voyager on my larger devices.

          On my tiny phone though, a few things stand out:

          • Large padding between posts. Should probably scale with font size (or let users specify)
          • Smallest font size could be smaller.
          • No way to hide top & bottom bar (Sync hides them on scroll)

          Might dump then on GitHub when I have the time. But if someone else redding this has the free time, feel free to do so :)