TL;DR: Mlem v1 is not fast; Mlem 2.0 (announcements coming soon!) will be.

We’re aware of a number of performance issues with the current codebase, which all together result in the app not behaving as responsively as we’d like. Unfortunately these are largely due to design choices made during the hectic sprint to App Store release last summer, and so are infeasible to fix without rewriting the app from the ground up—which is why that’s precisely what we’re doing. Our 2.0 build should be significantly faster; we’ll have some announcements about that in the near future.

Sure! One of the big things we’re reworking for 2.0 is how we handle accounts, which includes changing the format of how we persist account information. The compatibility changes in this build add extra decoding logic to the account persistence system so that both v1 and v2 can load a saved account regardless of which version saved it.

Thanks for the bug report, we’re looking into it!

This is not possible in the current version, but our 2.0 rewrite gives us the level of granular color control required to effectively implement such a feature, so we’ll be sure to include it when that ships.

Gif support is still one of our major outstanding tasks. We are currently working on a 2.0 version of the app, and are hoping to ship it with full inline gif support.

It is our policy not to make features-for-donations transactions, as we feel that would compromise the spirit of the project and set a dangerous precedent that could lead to development becoming beholden to the wealthiest donors. We really appreciate your enthusiasm and your generosity, though–we’re going to be busy for a little while getting 2.0 up and running, but we can tentatively scope widgets for 2.1!