this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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I prefer WefWef but still: this can only be a good thing for Lemmy. Glad this is out!
WefWef UI is great, just wish it wasn’t a web app
Honestly it’s hard to tell. Even on my old iPhone X it’s pretty seamless. I wish Apple and Android would give PWA apps more feature support overall tbh.
It’s definitely not as responsive and has a slightly laggy feel to it. I mean it looks and runs great for a webapp. But it just isn’t as good as a native app.
It’s the push notifications I’m missing most
It’s hard to tell until suddenly your phone is out of battery.
Oh PWAs take more battery?
Memmy is just a webapp with extra steps though.
The extra step is that it doesn’t run through Safari.
It's literally not lol
It is react native, meaning it uses the same basic web technologies as wefwef. It’s just bundled up and distributed through the app stores rather than through your browser. I am not complaining though both WefWef and Memmy are absolutely awesome.
It's not like electron or something. Sure metro works similarly to webpack, but it's not the same basic web technologies as wefwef. RN runs on threads on your device, a main thread, js thread and shadow thread. The js thread talks to the main thread through a bridge. React Native allows us to work and interface with native APIs with the device, while PWAs does not do that. PWAs don't do that on your phone, it's just like running on Safari really. While the code itself isn't "native" we end up with native components through the bridge. (If all of RN was just a webview then it would be more like how you're describing.)
The way RN works is fundamentally different than React, despite the syntax looking similar and RN being written in JS. It's not like its just React bundled up into a mobile app. I often wish they hadn't named it React Native for this reason, and for having to look up stuff and just getting React answers all the time lol. I am one of the Memmy devs and I am a React developer professionally. FYI this is not in any way a diss at wefwef for not being native, its super super impressive what they've done, I'm sure I could learn a lot about React from their code. Also sorry about the disjointed thoughts, I'm sure I repeated some stuff here or there lol. Hope this clarified a bit how RN works though.
Thanks for the great and detailed reply! Tbh I really thought React Native was just using the webview… super embarassing for a dev of 12 years.
Glad it was helpful!
There was a really annoying issue with wefwef for me - Swiping back to the Home Screen would result in a brief couple seconds of lag before I could scroll again. Apart from that I’d agree that is was great.
But this Memmy app is a lot better in that regard 👌
Interestingly enough, I am actually also getting this intermittently on Memmy after just switching.
Ah that’s annoying! Can’t be near as bad as I haven’t seen it myself.
Hope it’s something that can be resolved.
I had the same experience with wefwef which led me to try out Memmy. Memmy is much more seamless and feels more like a fully functional app.
It's so frustrating, because this is an iOS bug, and not an inherent problem with wefwef. Hoping they can find a workaround though!
I bounce back and forth between WefWef and Memmy and I think they are both great in their own way.
Wefwef feels like Apollo in a stable beta version: it doesn’t have everything I’m used to (blocking communities from the main feed is a big one) but everything is in the right place. Pity I only got it after Apollo went down, since I can’t get my data from Apollo now.
I’m just trying Lemmy (writing this comment on it) and it’s still rather light but thankfully speedier than on a browser.
I figure I’ll bounce between them for a bit and see which one starts to gain more usage and features. But yes, it’s good that there are more options available.
Quick question- what specifically were you looking to export from Apollo over to WefWef? I tried exporting the .json file from Apollo over to WefWef following the instructions and it basically was just a list of my subscribed communities and allowed me to search for similar communities on here (most of which were pretty niche and therefor not on here yet. Totally understandable.) Is there something else I’m missing?
That’s what I was looking for, yeah. Part of it was that I was subscribed to language learning communities (and memes in the target language: the shared language of memes provides a lot of context!) which can be named a large variety of things, so I’d be back at square one and searching for things manually.
It’s not the worst thing to be back to basics, because it forces me to explore and learn about the Fediverse, but there’s always going to be that nagging “did I get everything out of the old apartment” feeling as I drop off the key.
I love wefwef but I actually prefer this now!
Same
Wefwef is fast but it’s a web app, not a native one. It feels snappy and fast though.
Only reason I’m not on Wefwef anymore is because of the lack of haptics. Getting haptic feedback on votes and swipes is just too good, imo.
True. That’s the same reason I switched to memmy