Every time I go to the piefed frontpage I’m blown away by how much more polished it is. It has all the bells and whistles that lemmy is sometimes missing.
Whats the catch? Why aren’t we recommending everyone goes to piefed instead of lemmy?
App support is one thing I can think of.
True, MBin is small so I’m not surprised they cater to the bigger platform.
On Android, software can be made with free tools, released on Github/Gitlab/Forgejo/etc, and pushed into an F-Droid repo. Heck, you might not even need the F-Droid side, you can just throw an APK up at your free host of choice. Plus, I don’t think there’s a language restriction in terms of what can be compiled for Android (I’ll make my ignorance known here). Apple is not an open platform. One language is accepted, they have one way to develop software, one (overstuffed) place to download that software from. It is much more difficult to develop an app for iOS compared to Android. And if you try to monetize it, people will use a PWA.
To make it clear, this is not meant to be a debate on Apple. This is just my take on why free fediverse software is much more likely to show up on Android.
Agreed.
You may not be from the US, but in the US smartphone market, as of late 2024, iOS (Apple) holds a larger market share than Android, with iOS at around 58% and Android at 42%.
I’m the developer of Interstellar, and I am actually from the US. iOS support is something I’d like to add, but is not the priority. @[email protected] made many good points about it not catering towards FOSS projects, but I’d also like to add, it costs $100 every single year in order to have an Apple developer account, which is required if you want to publish anything to the Apple App Store. Additionally, Apple’s very expensive hardware is required in order to build and release any Apple software, which I do not own.
All that to say, I’d like to support iOS and macOS platforms, but Apple makes it extremely difficult (and costly) for that to happen. Why should I have to pay $100 every year in order to publish a free app that I’m not even making any money off of?
Man, that all makes perfect sense, and I appreciate the reply. Thanks for laying out the challenges for a small dev to develop for iOS.
I actually like the look of Mbin and Piefed, but like I said, I use Voyager to surf Lemmy a lot of the time, and Voyager doesn’t support Mbin/Piefed. I’d be willing to try and maybe switch to a different app, but there’s currently no iOS app for either. I’m not above using a PWA, but the Piefed instance I signed up to doesn’t even offer an actual PWA, but just a bookmark that opens Piefed in a Safari tab.
So, to bring it back to the original question, that’s the reasons that Piefed is a no-go for me.
I’m not, I was talking worldwide.
The US isn’t the only country, and I bet people using the fediverse skew heavily toward android in the US anyway.
I wasn’t trying to be derogatory, I know that outside the US Android is the dominant platform, but in the US it’s iOS. (I actually thought the percentage of iOS users would have been a little higher.)
That’s an interesting assumption that the Fediverse skews Android, I’d like to see some numbers on that.