> Updated! Updates are shown in quote text like this. Some scores are updated
following app updates. # An Apps Experiment ## Introduction This is an
experiment I performed out of curiosity, and I have a few big disclaimers at the
bottom. Basically, I’ve seen a lot of comments recently about one app or another
not displaying something right. Lemmy has been around for a while now and can no
longer be considered an experimental platform. Lemmy and the apps that people
use to access the platform have become an important part of people’s lives.
Whether you are checking the app weekly or daily, and whether you use it to stay
up on the news or to stay connected to your hobby, it’s important that it works.
I hope that this helps people to see the extent of the challenge, and encourages
developers to improve their apps, too. ## How I did it I wanted to investigate
objectively how accurately each app displays text of posts and comments using
the standard Lemmy markdown. Markdown is a standard part of the Lemmy platform,
but not all apps handle it the same. It is basically what gives text useful
formatting. I used the latest release of each app, but did not include
pre-releases. I only included apps that have released an update in the last 6
months, which should include most apps in active development. I was unable to
test iOS-exclusive apps, so they are not included either. In all, 16 apps met
the inclusion criteria. > I also added Eternity, which is in active development,
although it has not had a recent update. I was able to include several iOS apps
thanks to testing [https://lemmy.world/comment/11506252] from
@jordanlund@lemmy.world – Thanks, Jordan! This made for 21 apps that were
tested. Each app was rated in 5 categories: Text, Format, Spoilers, Links, and
Images. I chose these mostly based on the wonderful Markdown Guide from
@marvin@sffa.community, which was posted about a year ago in
!meta@sffa.community [/c/meta@sffa.community] (here
[https://sffa.community/post/105]). I checked whether each app correctly
displayed each category, then took the overall average. Each category was
weighted equally. Text includes italic, bold, strong, strikethrough,
superscript, and subscript. Format includes block quotes, lists, code (block and
inline), tables, and dividers. Spoilers includes display of hidden, expandable
spoilers. Links includes external links, username links, and community links.
Images included embedded images, image references, and inline images. > Thanks
to input from others, I also added a test to see if lemmy hyperlinks opened
in-app. There was a problem with using the SFFA Community Guide that caused some
apps to be essentially penalized twice because there was formatting inside
formatting, so I created this TEST POST [https://lemmy.world/comment/11514952]
to more clearly and fairly measure each app. In each case, I checked whether the
display was correct based on the rules for Lemmy Markdown, and consistent with
the author’s intent. In cases where the app recognized the tag correctly but did
not display it accurately, that was treated as a fail. ## Results Out of a
possible perfect 10, only 4 apps displayed all markdown correctly: ### Jerboa
(Official Android client) - 10.0 ### Alexandrite - 10.0 ### Voyager - 10.0 ###
Connect - 10.0 ### Photon - 10.0 ### Summit - 9.7 ### Quiblr - 9.5 ### Arctic -
9.3 ### Interstellar - 9.1 ### Lemmy-UI - 9.0 ### Thunder - 8.9 ### Tesseract -
8.6 ### mlmym - 8.0 ### Lemmios - 8.0 ### Mlem - 7.5 ### Boost - 7.3 ###
Eternity - 7.0 ### Sync - 6.9 ### Lemmynade - 6.1 ### Avelon - 5.7 More details
of testing here [https://lemmy.world/comment/11514952] ::: spoiler Disclaimers
## Disclaimers ### I Love Lemmy Apps (and their devs) Lemmy apps devs work very
hard, and invest a lot in the platform. Lemmy is better because they are doing
the work that they do. Like, a LOT better. Everyone who uses the platform has to
access it through one app or another. Apps are the face of the entire platform.
Whether an app is a FOSS passion project, underwritten by a grant, or generating
income through sales or ads, no one is getting rich by making their app. It is
for the benefit of the community. This is not meant to be a rating of the
quality or functionality of any app. An app may have a high rating here but be
missing other features that users want, or users may love an app that has a
lower rating. This is just about how well apps handle markdown. ### This is
pretty unscientific You’ll see my methodology above. I’m not a scientist. There
is probably a much better way to do this, and I probably have biases in terms of
how I went about it. I think it’s interesting and probably has some valuable
information. If you think it’s interesting, let me know. If you think of a
better way, PM me and I’d be happy to share what I have so you don’t have to
start from scratch. ### My only goal is to help the community I do think that
accurately displaying markdown should be a standard expectation of a finished
app. I hope that devs use this as an opportunity to shore up the areas that are
lagging, and that they have a set of standards to aim for. I don’t have any
Apple things Sorry. This is just Android and Web review. If someone would like
to see how iOS apps are doing, please reach out and I’ll share how we can work
together to include them. :::
The linked post essentially performed a benchmark of lemmy apps and if they properly display the formating options available. Sync got 3rd last place, position 18 out of 20 apps, with a score of 6.9 out of 10. There’s a comment that essentially contains the test set. I hope we get some fixes, cause some of the problems have been around for a while.
In my personal experience the issues with spoiler tags, and some of the embedded images and their sizes is rather annoying. For example this comment shows perfectly fine on desktop, but becomes a garbled mess on sync (as you can tell by my comment, blaming the bot). Also note that while sync technically gets 3/3 for the images, the last image should be text-sized between the “arrows”. It isn’t, it’s just huge (and consequently a pixelated mess).
I’d definitely say that was a last straw thing. Raccoon needed a lot of love and I think it was just a PoC. It would kinda work but it certainly had a long way to go.
I’d definitely say that was a last straw thing. Raccoon needed a lot of love and I think it was just a PoC. It would kinda work but it certainly had a long way to go.