Updated! Updates are shown in quote text like this. Some scores are updated following app updates.

An Apps Experiment

Cross-posted from https://lemmy.world/post/18159531

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 from @[email protected] – Thanks, Jordan! This made for 20 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 @[email protected], which was posted about a year ago in [email protected] (here).

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 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, 6 apps displayed all markdown correctly:

Alexandrite - 10.0

Connect - 10.0

Jerboa (Official Android client) - 10.0

Photon - 10.0

Summit - 10.0

Voyager - 10.0

Quiblr - 9.5

Arctic - 9.3

Interstellar - 9.1

Lemmuy-UI - 9.0

Thunder - 8.9

Tesseract - 8.6

mlmym - 8.0

Racoon - 7.6

Boost - 7.3

Eternity - 7.0

Lemmios - 6.9

Sync - 6.9

Lemmynade - 6.1

Avelon - 5.7

More details of testing here

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.

  • Xylight (Photon Dev)@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    Hey, I’m the Photon dev. I’d like to know which parts Photon incorrectly displayed, so far I only see tables rendering incorrectly. I’ll have this fixed soon.

    Update: fixed table displays, pushed to main

    Could this be updated now? 🥺 (you can test here)

  • nocturne@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Is there a list of what each app failed? It would be nice for the devs to be able to see. I use Mlem, and there is about to be a new release rebuilding it from the ground up. Hopefully it will rate higher once that happens.

  • Aurelius@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Left this comment in the other thread too, but posting here for visibility:

    Quiblr should now have each of the markdown criteria fixed. Huge thanks for the feedback and for all this analysis. Consistent markdown is important for a great and consistent user experience across the lemmy ecosystem

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Great! Thank you for the gorgeous app. I really love the style, and I think the personalized feed is brilliant.

      On my device, the lemmy hyperlink in the test post is still opening outside the app. I’m not sure how other web apps handle this but it would be the only additional change that would make it a perfect score.

      As an aside, I would love to see it as a PWA or standalone app. I don’t know if that’s on your roadmap but I think it would be neat.

      • Aurelius@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Thanks for the Quiblr compliments! And Post and Comment links should now open in-app. I think that covers everything

        And Quiblr is a PWA. Native apps are in the works

  • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    cross-posted

    Minor nit pick, but did you know that Lemmy has actual cross posting functionality?

    Either way, interesting study. This is the type of content that I Red er… Lemmy for, so thanks for posting. I use Voyager myself, being an Apollo refugee.

    • WanderingVentra@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Ya I’ve only been able to cross post on the web UI. I’ve seen apps like Jerboa and Voyager at least show cross posting correctly, I just wish they made it easier to cross-post in app.

      • micahmo@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        Thunder allows cross-posting! It should follow the web UI implementation (where the body of the new post has a link to the original, plus the original contents in a quote block).

        • WanderingVentra@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          Oh nice! That’s the one I’ve probably tried the least so I’ll have to give that one another go. (Not for any particular reason, I just got used to the UI of the first couple other apps I tried). Thanks for the good news!

      • Nothing4You@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        it does, but only if you use the autocomplete feature. it’s also a bit delayed without any indicator that it’s loading.

        if you type @gedal and wait a moment it’ll load @[email protected] to be selected:

        • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Yes, I’m not sure if that is meant to be a placeholder or a substitute for native user links. What it actually does is generate markup that converts the username into a web link, which is fine for most circumstances, but not ideal. A plaintext username should automatically link to the user. This creates an inconsistent behavior between posts depending on where (and when) they were typed.

          In other words, it’s a very helpful feature, but it is not recognizing and linking usernames.

          • BentiGorlich@thebrainbin.org
            1·
            3 months ago

            Actually that behaviour is very annoying to other platforms. Mbin for example can only link to the lemmy server this user is on and no longer the local profile of that user. Example: @ user @ lemmy.instance gets converted to [@ user @ lemmy.instance](https:// lemmy.instance/u/user so on mbin this does not open the profile of the user on the local server, but instead links the lemmy instance, so you leave your instance to view the profile.

            (spaces included so this won’t get converted to mentions, etc)

        • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          What happens if you press tab or click on the suggested item at the point in your screenshot?

          For me, it inserts the link at the cursor position, but doesn’t replace the bit you’ve already typed, resulting in @gedal[@gedaliyah@lemmy.world](URL).

          Anyone else have this issue?

          • Nothing4You@programming.devEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            on firefox, if i type @gedal and click or press tab once it replaces the text with [@gedaliyah@lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/u/gedaliyah) . the behavior is the same whether i hit tab, enter or click the text.

            • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              0·
              3 months ago

              if i type @gedal and click or press tab once it replaces the text with [@gedaliyah@lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/u/gedaliyah)

              Ah, you are correct. It turns out that the issue I was encountering was a little more subtle.

              If I type all the way to @gedaliyah@ and click or press tab once it replaces only the second ‘@’, resulting in @gedaliyah[@gedaliyah@lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/u/gedaliyah).

  • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I don’t understand why there isn’t a “markdown library” of some sort that software developers can just use in their app. I haven’t looked too deep into this, but it has always seemed to me that every app must individually implement markdown display. Why?

    • micahmo@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      As one of the Thunder devs, I can say there are markdown libraries. Thunder is written in Dart/Flutter and there is a great library that we use.

      https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_markdown

      That said, and as others have mentioned, markdown is not as well standardized and it seems like just about every site renders it differently, so there are a lot of edge cases to handle. Lemmy also has several unique implementations of things, such as spoilers, superscript/subscript, and the ability to tag users/communities without a hyperlink.

      In fact, one of the things Thunder failed on (table alignment) is a known bug in the markdown library we use. :-)

      https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/109487

    • Huschke@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      The problem isn’t that there are no libraries out there that parse Markdown. There are, in fact, plenty for all different languages. The issue is that every site has its own flavor of it. Lemmy does it one way, GitHub another, and something else does it completely differently yet again.

      It is, unfortunately, kind of a mess.