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.

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[–] Nusm@yall.theatl.social -1 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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%.

[–] jwr1@kbin.earth 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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. @Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 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?

[–] Nusm@yall.theatl.social 2 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] Meshuggah333@fedia.io 7 points 1 day ago

I'm not, I was talking worldwide.

[–] moonlight@fedia.io 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The US isn't the only country, and I bet people using the fediverse skew heavily toward android in the US anyway.

[–] Nusm@yall.theatl.social 2 points 1 day ago

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.