It seems like it’s alive again. You saved it OP!

It would make sense that eventually you could do both real-time and after-the-fact calculations depending on whether real-time communications is available. Presumably it will depend on the specific application

Yeah Android CAN run the app if you have the APK. But also the play store won’t let you if the dev hasn’t updated the app in a couple of years. Older games are especially bad.

Indeed. It seems this wouldn’t be useful for applications where real-time position is needed. You would most likely do the calculation at a later time like in the Miikshi video. It’s a little confusing from the article, but the video actually does a good job of explaining this limitation.

I think the most amazing part about this is the video at the bottom of the article: Miikshi: Cosmic Rays (4K). The caption calls it a “charming fictional animated video to explain their muon-based systems”. But I cannot emphasize enough how much this undersells it.

It’s like a weird charming mashup between Thunderbirds, Muppets and a real muon science team. You really have to just watch it.

If you had trouble understanding what the muon positioning system from the article might be used for or how it works there is a short explanation from Professor Tanaka at the end of the video.

For a Reddit/Lemmy app though I would still prefer images to load in the app itself, because it’s more seamless. For now Jerboa handles images and GIFV just like any other link.

RIF let’s you configure this, which is nice. For Jerboa I think the default should eventually be to load them in the app itself (RIF calls this “Native”).

Edit: Jerboa does already load the OP image in-app when you open the comments. I think that behavior shouldn’t change. It’s just when you open the image from the news feed that it opens it like a link currently.

When you open a link from Jerboa it should open a mini in-app version of your main browser. If your default browser app is set to Firefox it will say “Powered by Firefox” and if it is Chrome it will say “Running in Chrome”. UX wise it is very similar to having a bundled in-app browser. But the rendering is handled by your main browser.

I’m not up-to date with the story behind this, but my understanding is that new apps that want in-app browers should be implemented in this way. This seems to be the modern way of doing it. The reason for it I believe is mostly security. Your main browser app should be up-to-date on security patches and features, and if apps can just piggie back off that then they don’t need to worry about shipping and patching their own in-app copy of the browser. Also it respects the user’s choice of default browser. So if your default browser is Chrome it will use that for the in-app browser for all apps that work this way (which is quickly becoming most apps).

Another advantage of doing it this way is that when you use the “Open in Firefox” button it seems to just move the tab from one app to the other rather than reloading it, so it happens almost instantly.

I’ve been using Jerboa so far. It’s pretty nice. At first I was a bit sceptical because it seemed a little half baked. But it’s growing on me. Also now that I’ve used it for a while I think it’s relatively well rounded feature wise. It is quite minimal, but I think a lot of people probably like that. I think long term if other apps come up that are more similar to the existing 3rd party Reddit apps I will probably switch though.

My main issue so far is not being able to follow links to communities inside the app. I imagine this will probably be more difficult to implement than on Reddit because of federation, but hopefully apps can get that working eventually.

Also it can be difficult to add new communities from other servers even via search. Which is also a federation issue.

I also miss the features from Reddit Is Fun which let you choose which content is displayed in-app vs in a web browser. But that’s only a minor annoyance so far.

I find I am getting used to the visual style of comments. I initially didn’t like it, but it’s growing on me.