Limbo and Limmynade have joined forces, and will continue development together as Liftoff!
The past couple of weeks have been tremendously exciting times for all of us as events elsewhere have led to a massive growth in interest in and usage of Lemmy.
Our two separate projects both started with the intention of bringing an existing open-source code base Lemmur up to date, with the aim of helping new users to have a great first experience of Lemmy, while giving existing users access to many rich features. As soon as we became aware of each other we realised that we would work much more effectively by combining our efforts. Read more about what makes Liftoff! special.
We are:
Zach—Extensive experience in Enterprise full stack architecture and infrastructure.
Michael—Many years experience of developing and managing commercial and open source software projects.
Liftoff! is written in Dart for API support and Flutter for front-end development, meaning that it can run wherever Flutter runs. Our primary targets right now are Android and iOS, but the sky’s the limit!
Our current development priorities are to:
- Ensure that the app runs robustly on iOS and Android platforms.
- Identify and address any major bugs affecting key functionality
- Work to improve the user experience on both platforms.
- Release 1.0 version
Beta builds now available on TestFlight and will soon be available on F-Play and Google Store. (Note that the TestFlight page still refers to it as Limbo, but it does indeed install as Liftoff!)
Liftoff code is made available under GPL2.0 and can be found at https://github.com/liftoff-app
We have already had tremendous support from enthusiastic Lemmy users as separate projects and we look forward to continuing to work with you all. Code contributions, bug fixes, issue reports and suggestions are all welcome, so please join us on our journey into the unknown!
This is great, even in its current state it's head and shoulders above other options. I had started something myself as a pet project, but you guy have already made a start on my list of feature ideas and I see you're open to pull requests.
I'd love to see a bit of an AMA style roadmap discussion, I can see from the git issues there's plenty of bugfixes and feature requests, but I'm curious if you have any long term design, feature or Ux ambitions?
Personally I'm more frontend/Ux than developer, sadly as a product owner I rarely get to write code in work these days so my skills are limited to 'pet projects'. Do you think there'd be any interest in adopting material3 or was you going for more of a device agnostic approach (or more likely is it a leftover from Lemmur)?
Also, You mentioned F-Droid, no ambition to put it on Google Play? I know it's early days but it's relatively simple and currently there's a complete lack of options for the average user? I personally think this is a huge barrier for people coming from reddit - the kindling for the exodus was lack of third party app integrations but when you look at Lemmy, there's basically only 1 app and it's not great from a Ux perspective.
Good luck with the next steps, wishing the project success!
Love your thoughts in here. Google play is coming, review is pending. Should be any day now.
About the roadmap and UX design vision right now we just want a robust app that we want to use ourselves. We're almost there.
For longer term vision and design direction you should join our matrix and we can have these discussions!
#liftoff-dev:matrix.org