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 from @jordanlund@lemmy.world – 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 @marvin@sffa.community, which was posted about a year ago in !meta@sffa.community (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, 7 apps displayed all markdown correctly:
Alexandrite - 10.0
Connect - 10.0
Jerboa (Official Android client) - 10.0
Photon - 10.0
Quiblr - 10.0
Summit - 10.0
Voyager - 10.0
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
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.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! Could you add links to the apps?
The lemmy apps community (this one) has a megathread with links and info about the apps. Let me know if you need the direct link.
I checked it out after posting, but I had to go back and forth between threads to find and compare the apps tested. I feel that it would have been easier to check out the apps if there were links directly in your rankings.
Can Boost get negative points for their weird bespoke spoiler format?
Pinging @kuro_neko@lemmy.ca
👀 thanks for the ping. pushing an update now.
Interesting to see that even Lemmy-UI does not display markdown completely correctly
Thanks for doing those tests. I’m honestly surprised Tes scored as high as it did considering I switched markdown renderers several versions ago and knowingly left a few things unsupported.
The one I’m using uses Github style markdown, and I’ve had to add some shims to that to support Lemmy’s flavor. Overall, it’s much easier to work with (and extend) than
markdown-it, but, on the downside, I had to accept that sub- and superscript wouldn’t be supported at all. There’s also some annoying default behaviors that cannot easily be overridden.I’m planning at some point to fork and patch that to address those limitations as well as add some more fine-grained control over the default linkificaiton ( e.g. so usernames without the
prefix won’t be linked asmailto:email addresses). Hopefully those will be accepted upstream, but if not, I’ll probably maintain it for my own purposes.A number of apps struggled with treating usernames as mailto links. Another thing I came across that was not tested here was how some apps fail to render tags inside of other tags.
tags inside of other tags.
[] ]?If so, I didn’t even think to handle those (or recall ever seeing them in the wild). lol. I did think to break out comma-delimited words inside a tag and treat them as separate tags.
Yes, I have seen strange things happen when using tables inside spoilers, or usernames inside code-blocks, etc. Those cases were not tested, but would be interesting to see.
Table Inside Spoiler
Heading 1 Heading 2 Heading 3 Testing 1 2 (Yay, works on my machine)
Works on Thunder.
Images included embedded images, image references, and inline images.
Did you test anything like gif, mp4, etc.? I have no idea if it is an official feature or whatever, but I have noticed that only some clients support it
No, but I have a plan to do a more comprehensive test of features people are interested in. Right now, it can be tricky for users to know which apps have which features unless they try them all. It would be nice to have a resource that compares apps at a glance, although I’m not quite sure what that looks like just yet.
Surprised to see Boost that low in the rankings. Literally the only issue I’m aware of is the spoiler syntax isn’t supported. I’ve always considered it much more solid in the way it feels compared to the other apps. I think I’ve used most of them.
I was not joking about this not being an indication of overall quality. My favorite apps are lower on this list but have other great features! I hope to have a better resource in the future to provide App reviews for different features.
Spoilers are pretty important though. That’s one or like to see in every app.
Gotcha. Like some other users, I’m quite curious to see the details of how you arrived at these scores. The spoiler thing can be important, but for some reason it doesn’t bother me personally all that much. I’m very curious if there are other rendering issues with Boost outside of that one.
Superscript and subscript
ah yep I have seen that too. Thanks!
Sync appears to get most of these right.
@gedaliyah@lemmy.world iOS testing, not sure how you score these so I just listed out the broken stuff.
Arctic - Link opens in App. Headings fail, images fail, everything else looks fine.
Avelon - Link opens in browser, not app. Manually went to test post. Bold+Italic fails (Italic works, not Bold). Table fails. Horizontal Rule fails. Spoiler fails. Everything else looks good.
Bean - Link opens in browser, not app. Manually went to test post. Text formatting block fails so hard, it’s not even visible(!) Heading fails. Code Block fails, Inline Code fails. Links and Image work, but not inline, only at the bottom of the post. Table fails. Horizontal rule fails.
CheeseBot - Did not test. $2.99, no free version.
Lemmios - Link opens in app. Everything looks and works great EXCEPT Spoilers.
Mlem - Link opens in browser, not app. Manually went to test post. As with Lemmios, everything looks and works great EXCEPT spoilers.
Remmel - Instant fail. No development in 2 years, unable to even add an instance or an account. Non-starter.
Thunder - Hard to test. Lots of lag for some reason. Link opens in browser, not app. Manually went to test post. That being said, EVERYTHING worked. The lag may have been because I had just linked my account. Testing everything above, then coming back to Thunder, I found it fast and responsive.
Voyager - Link opens in app. EVERYTHING worked. No notes.
So, ranking them:
Voyager - EVERYTHING worked. No notes.
Thunder - Everything worked, but laggy to start with when using a year old account with lots of data. Once it caught up, everything was fine. Would probably be great with a new account.
Lemmios - Link opens in app by default. Spoilers don’t work.
Mlem - Link opens in browser by default but is user configurable. Spoilers don’t work.
Arctic - A few minor failures.
Avelon - A few more failures than Arctic.
Bean - Hey, it works better than Remmel.
Remmel - Instant fail.
CheeseBot - Did not test. $2.99, no free version.
It’s late here but I will probably need screen grabs. I’ll nsg you in the morning
It’s late here but I will probably need screen grabs. I’ll msg you in the morning
Yeah, I accidentally posted early. Edited with the screen grabs.
I’m a bit sad for Neon Modem Overdrive to not have been included to make it a flat 1.0 on that list. :-)
First time I hear about it, you should probably make another post to talk about it
Test post:
Text (of 6)
Is this italic? (1)
Is this bold? (1)
Is this strong? (1)
Is this
strikethrough? (1)Is this superscript? (1)
Is this subscript? (1)
Format (of 5)
Quotes (1)
Is this
a blockquote?
Is this separated?
List (1)
- Is
- This
- A
- mixed
- level
- list?
Code (1)
def hello_world(): print("Is this code block?")Is this
inline code?Table (1)
Is This a Table? Left? Center? Right? Horizontal line (1)
Is there a line below?
Spoilers (1)
Is this expandable?
Is this collapsible?
Links (of 4)
Is this a link? (1)
Did it open in the app? (1)
User: @gedaliyah@lemmy.world (Does it link to the user?) (1)
Community: !lemmyapps@lemmy.world (Does it link to the community) (1)
Images (of 3)
Is Lemmy above? (1)
Is Lemmy above? (1)
Is Lemmy between the arrows? ➡️
⬅️ (1)Detailed results:
My testing captures are below:
Summit:
Photon:
Arctic:
Interstellar:
Lemmy-UI:
Thunder:
Tesseract:
Quiblr:
mlmym:
Lemmios:
Raccoon:
Mlem:
Boost:
Eternity:
Sync:
Connect:
Lemmynade:
Avelon:
Quiblr should now have each of the markdown criteria fixed. Thank you for the feedback and for your diligence in digging into the markdown and promoting a more consistent Lemmy experience across apps.
Connect ok android - everything works except superscript and subscript.
Seems to have been fixed 100% now. 🎉
The third Lemmy picture was rendering full width, it’s now icon sized.
On Boost, everything except super, sub and spoilers work. @rmayayo@lemmy.world
Send screenshots of the test post linked above and I’ll update it. That was not my result on the device/version I used
Thank you - that affirms the score above. The detailed results are posted if you wish to confirm for yourself.
Thanks! I’ll update these tomorrow
Arctic: Inline images fail, everything else works!
Avelon: Strong and Subscript both fail. Code, Table, Spoilers, HR all fail. Everything else works!
It looks like the code block and inline code are correct… Am I missing something?
Lemmios: Subscript and Quotes fail, Code and Spoilers Fail
Same thing, the code looks correct to me.
Mlem: Subscript fails, Spoiler fails, 2nd inline image fails.
The code block varies from app to app. I gave it a pass here because it did format it, it just didn’t format it in full color the way other apps do.
That is my experience as well. I’d like to eventually have some more complete review that covers more user requested features and I think having a quality code display would be one of them. There is a lot of discussion about and sharing code, so for some communities it would make a huge difference.
No Eternity?
Personally, I notice it doesn’t handle spoilers correctly but otherwise no complaints.
Eternity is in active development but does not have a recent release
I understand that you might need to limit your scope in some way but excluding one of the best because it is essentially “too stable” seems silly ;p
Now included above by popular demand
Oh sweet, thanks!
Hello! I’m the dev of Summit. Do you remember what Summit failed on? I would be very interested so I can fix it (seems like it failed maybe one or two things I’m guessing?)
Anyways thanks for doing this!
Thank you - I’m not sure if I replied to you individually. I had a couple requests to post more details, which are here: https://lemmy.world/comment/11514952
Thanks to you
Ah I think I puzzled it out. Summit doesn’t render subscripts correctly. I’ll fix this in the next update.
This is so cool to see, what a great dev
Great! Thank you for the great app!
You forgot about Eternity
Would love to hear about it’s score since it’s my favorite way to browse Lemmy :)
Yay, Eternity fans! So glad that the dev has returned, too.
added above by popular demand
Thank you!
@DieguiTux8623@feddit.it Raccoon got lowest score 😭
Unfortunately, there was a flaw in the original test that essentially penalized the app twice when it shouldn’t have. I have corrected this and the updated score is above.
People can use Jerboa!
Raccoon is best never switching back to Jerboa
Now you might
Raccoon is still great!
Markdown rendering libraries do their best, and Raccoon uses one of the best in the KMP ecosystem.
It would be nice to know what the benchmarks were to see whether anything can be done to improve the results, in any case I feel sorry for this low rating and this is why I advise people to switch to another app if this is not acceptable.
BTW The Raccoon project never got real “traction” and I have other side projects I would like to do in my spare time so it is what it is unfortunately.
SO, in reviewing the scores, I realized that Raccoon does not render tables correctly, but also, I was checking some formatting that was within a table, which was also not rendered correctly. This resulted in the app getting marked down twice when it shouldn’t have. I am posting an update shortly that will correct this.
I am very sorry for this oversight. I should have gone about this part differently.
Could you please share the score for each point and make it clear the mechanism through which scores have been assigned? Raccoon has indeed great flaws in how it renders Markdown and the maintainers are well aware of them, but for transparency it would be better to disclose all the details.
Still better than some other apps.
