Native Alpha is an Android app that lets you easily create PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) of your favourite websites. Basically, it’s a way to make a website look and work like an app in a matter of seconds.
I’ve mostly used it to access websites that are effectively spyware (Instagram, Facebook etc) but still somewhat necessary to visit every now and then. This is because Native Alpha also has the added benefit of sandboxing PWAs from the rest of your phone. You can tailor each PWA to your needs (block ads, disable cookies etc).
But with Lemmy, I’ve actually enjoyed using Native Alpha for its primary purpose (easy PWAs) instead of secondary one (privacy).
Here’s how you can set up Lemmy on Native Alpha:
- Download & install Native Alpha from F-Droid or the Play Store
- From the main screen, click the “+” icon from the bottom right
- Input the URL of your Lemmy instance
- Tweak the rest of the settings, or leave them unchanged. Personally, I like to allow the PWA to open links in my browser. I’m not too worried about the privacy risks of this, but YMMV of course.
- You’ll now have the option to create an app icon on the home screen if you’d like. Completely up to you.
- All set! Access the PWA from your homescreen or Native Alpha, login, and you’ve got your very own Lemmy “app” in basically <1 minute
You can stop reading now, but some extra thoughts. Pros of this approach:
- Unlike Jerboa, you can now create communities and search posts (not just communities) from your new Lemmy “app”
- Unlike Jerboa, you can now mark messages read from you inbox
- Jerboa is obviously not invasive, but you save some space on your phone, and prevent any potential additional tracking that would’ve come from installing an extra app
Some cons:
- You still can’t open links to other instances within the app. I’m sure there’s an easy workaround for this, I’m just not sure what that is.
- Native Alpha is a bit glitchy with opening links within a PWA. This is why I chose to open links in my external browser above.
- Some UI gestures are unintuitive. To reload, you need to swipe down with two fingers. But if you also enable the “pinch to zoom” option from your PWA settings, you lose the reload functionality for some reason.
Have you already used Native Alpha? Your thoughts on the experience?
If there’s interest, I can also share a quick recording of the Lemmy experience on my phone.
I think you’re right in that the structure is confusing. Personally, I think it’s less confusing than it is “novel”. Like in a world where the fediverse was the norm, centralised apps would’ve been confusing.
Either which way, I think you’re correct – part of it is because we don’t really have a good analogy for how this whole thing works.
This is how I see it: Lemmy is like a house party hosted in a huge venue that has hundreds of doors (i.e. instances). The doors have some slight differences (maybe some are huge, some are tiny, some have bouncers, some let you bring your own costumes etc). But for the most part, it doesn’t really matter what door you enter the party through, as all doors open into the same common space.
However, the door you choose does make you physically closer to one cluster of people than the rest of the party. That’s how I see the “local” filter. But if you’re just interested in getting into the party asap, just pick any instance and join.
This still isn’t a perfect analogy though – if a door shuts down, you don’t magically disappear from the party. But if an instance goes down, you do. Still, for the uninitiated, I feel like this is a sensible enough analogy.