Mastonaut for Android

I'm fed up with "Android" apps that are just reskinned Windows apps, or bizarre Java conglomerations, or Electron web frames. Mastonaut is NONE of these. It's beautiful, it's clearly Android-native by someone who knows what that means.

As an ardent lover of both the Fediverse and native Android apps, I could easily justify the price tag for a native app. The app is indeed delightful to use. I would love to see it become more feature rich, e.g. combine multiple hashtags into one column. see the “Followed” list of an account, etc. Already sent an email for feedback.

Mastonaut does what it says it does, which is pretty good, because it says it does a lot! I'm enjoying using it to stay updated on the instances I'm on. It supports Android's dark mode without me needing to tell it, which seems to be a common shortcoming for a lot of apps for similar platforms. Most of my criticisms concern the UI. This is good! It means that the app mostly does what it should and I'm not frustrated by lost data or anything like that. The first criticism is that, when the app is fullscreen, the window to compose a new toot opens on the main desktop space. I would expect, like with e.g. Mail.app or Twitter apps, the compose window to open as part of the app's full screen window. This is not a major annoyance, but it does take me out of the flow of composing. I wouldn't want to compose a long thread in Mastonaut right now because of this, though. Similarly, having an active conversation with someone would be inconvenient in fullscreen. The next issue I've encountered is that the UI buttons for interacting with media windows that pop up sometimes are hard to see, and there are two sets of icons that show up. One is the set you expect in a Android app, the others don't belong and seem like they're part of a Chrome webapp view. Another issue, that I just encountered, is that somehow I triggered video playback on a video that wasn't open when I hit the wrong key somewhere in the app's UI. I'm not sure how this happened, but it wasn't what I expecting. The video wasn't visible in the UI. Another minor issue relates to replying to boosted toots. When I do this, the booster is left out. I would at least like the option to include the booster so that everyone involved can participate in the conversation. I'm new to Mastodon so this may be a social convention, but I'd at least like the option to do things the way I want rather than having to do it manually. The most serious issue that I've encountered, the one that prompted this review so that it gets visibility, is that Mastonaut doesn't show replies to toots when I select "show toot details". This means that I can't view conversation threads in Mastonaut and need to open threads in my browser. I'd really like to have all of my Mastodon experiences in Mastonaut, but this in particular makes it very difficult. My interactions on the platform center around conversations, so not having conversations supported means I can't quite do everything I need in the app. *That said*, though, this is a *very* polished app that really feels native on Android, and that's not something I've come to expect of federated chat / social apps. Bravo! I really look forward to seeing the app mature and grow, and am happy to have purchased it. UPDATE Mastonaut still doesn't supprt filters, which means that if you find content triggering (like I do), Mastonaut doesn't protect you from it. This makes it untenable as a client for me. It's polsihed, it does pretty much everything I want, but until it supports filters, I can't really use it for the sake of my mental health.

Mastonaut has most of what I want in a Mastodon app, and it is regularly improving. One thing I wish for: the notifications/activity panel to stay open between app launches. It's a little thing, but it's kind of tedious to have to reopen it every time I launch Mastonaut. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy. Buy it.

This is one of the better Mastodon clients for the Android but it has a tendency to stop updating. This usually happens overnight but will occasionally stop after a couple of hours. Switching timelines usually gets it going again but you shouldn't have to do this.