It seems like Voyager and Thunder have quite a few features the others don’t have such as advanced search, gif support and user labels.
I’ve been using Boost. It has user tags, instance blocking which can even be extended to comments from blocked instances. Search is kinda eh, and sometimes gifs from less common sites won’t load, but overall I’m happy with the experience.
Previously I used Connect. It was pretty good. Had similar features as Boost, but I found more issues loading content with Connect. Admittedly that was about a year ago so things may have improved, but I haven’t gone back to check.
Boost and sync definitely seem the smoothest and most features rich, boost has better search though
Sync has ads, unless you do a one time purchase, I don’t think I paid for boost but I could be wrong, either way, I have no issue supporting developers. Just because something is paid doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad, if they’re making a living making these apps and they are dedicated to making them better and better I have no issue contributing financially. They are the best two apps. It’s a one time purchase, not a subscription. You can continuously support if you like but it’s not mandatory. And yes they’re closed source, which isn’t ideal but I understand the want to protect their code if it’s their livelihood and they’ve put so much effort into them.
I love Connects “add user note” that shows up next to a users user name! Super useful.
Would like to have the ability to like “check off” posts I already have seen/dealt with.
Connect also collapses comments which I never use except mistakenly, app very smooth otherwise. I have had some images not show up, gotta go inside the post to see them (nsfw only).
Voyager has both a manual hide read button and an auto hide upon read option
Voyager is very good
I had loads of communication problems trying to use Voyager on Android - I wonder if it was b/c it may not work as well for non-Lemmy.World accounts? (the one I tried to have it work with was on Discuss.Online) Like I would reply to someone but not be able to see my reply, or receive a notification and not be able to see their message to me, and refreshing did not work, nor did simply waiting minutes of time, though force-quitting the app and reloading always did.
Now I switched to PieFed so it doesn’t matter, but basically I think you have to just download apps and try them until you find one you like b/c there’s always going to be something.
Oh that’s good to know, thanks. I wonder if it was something special for my instance, or perhaps using Blokada (I thought there were no ads in it, but I can’t imagine running a phone without that:-), or something else entirely. If I hadn’t moved to PieFed already I would have submitted a bug report. Perhaps I still should if it would help others.
But your scenario at least lessens the projected scenarios of who may be affected, which is good for the sake of making the Fediverse easier to use by more people:-).
Thunder is the only Lemmy app that shows you user posting stats