“whrere dowenloed?”
Back in early June 2023 when the pricing changes were announced, I didn’t really care that much myself as I had never used any 3rd party client, nor had the wish to do so in my 4+ years of lurking. Now, this is my personal opinion, but most of the clients I’d seen ranged from poor design to outright ugly, just like old.reddit.com (don’t @ me). Whether it be for memes, osu! scoreposts, or nowadays just crossposted art from Twitter, I had always stubbornly used the website on my phone. Combined with adblock, the older design functioned mostly fine for me.
Now, returning back to the API shutdown, I really was amazed how childish the community was. Yelling at u/spez perfectly understandable, but actual action? None. Let’s be honest — a 2-day blackout was never actually going to do anything. It just showed Reddit that people will always come back no matter what they do. Reddit isn’t replaceable, despite what all the people praising Lemmy say. Everybody being focused on the public API pricing made them forget about how 1st party apps actually work – I’ll leave it at that.
Wanting to make something, I planned to start development on the 16th, though I had the initial idea a bit earlier:
Design
Upvote loosely follows Material 3, a design language for Android. Likewise, it is also heavily inspired by Sync in some aspects as it also follows M3 and is overall pretty.
// # (TODO: add screenshots)
iOS?
TLDR; no support for foreseeable future
We made the decision to use and structure our code using Kotlin Multiplatform, giving us the ability to write shared logic once. Despite how great this seems, we have decided not to reuse our UI as it doesn’t fit the iOS style. Rewriting half the app is hard especially given none of us are iOS devs, and only one of us has a hackintosh at all. I might be able to set up a macOS VM soon though, so there’s that. However, Android will always come first and as such we will first focus on finishing Upvote for a platform that isn’t garbage.