tom-james-watson/thunder

Thunder - An open-source cross-platform Lemmy client for iOS and Android built with Flutter

Thunder

An open source, cross-platform Lemmy client built with Flutter

Features • Roadmap

Contributing • Building From Source • Conventions

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Hey there! Just wanted to let you know that this repo is currently my personal side project to build something cool while learning about Dart and Flutter.

Contributions to this project are always welcomed, and in fact, even strongly encouraged here! Since I am only able to work on this during my spare time, any contributions from the community is valuable. If you are a developer, feel free to tackle any issues present.

Your passion, contributions, and ideas would be greatly appreciated! Together, let's make this project shine. 🚀 💻

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Communities

If you want to join in on further discussions around Thunder, feel free to join the lemmy communities or the Matrix space!

Community: https://lemmy.world/c/thunder_app
Nightly Community: https://lemmy.world/c/thunder_nightly

Matrix Space: https://matrix.to/#/#thunderapp:matrix.org

Releases

Android

If you are on Android, you can download Thunder from the Google Play Store. There is also an option to obtain the releases through IzzyOnDroid if you are interested. Finally, all releases (including alpha builds) are available in the Releases section under the corresponding version.

iOS

If you are on iOS, there is TestFlight available through this link. An alternative is to download the corresponding IPA file in the Releases section and install it through AltStore.

Features

Thunder is currently undergoing active alpha development, and it is possible that not all features have been fully implemented at this stage. Due to this, significant breaking changes may occur between versions. The next section summarizes the features that are currently implemented.

Communities

• Browsing through general (All/Local/Subscribed) feeds, including specific communities
• Ability to search for communities that are federated with the current instance
• See a list of subscriptions, and access their community posts and general information
• Ability to block a specific community

Posts & Comments

• Voting and save actions for posts and comments
• Swipe actions for posts and comments with customizable actions
• Infinite scrolling for posts and comments
• Ability to create a new post, and reply to posts/comments
• Sharing links, media, comments from posts and comments

Authentication

• Ability to log into multiple instances, and switch between them
• Basic inbox capabilities, view replies, mentions and private messages
• View your own profile, including posts, comments, and saved content

Theme & Customization

Feed

• Two-column view for tablets
• Setting default feed/sort types

Posts

• Different post views - compact, normal, expanded (full-image)
• Swipe customizations on posts (voting, saving, marking as read, etc.)
• Showing text preview, actions, moving title to the top, etc.

Themes

• Follow system theme and Material You theming
• Light, dark, and OLED themes available
• Customizable font size selections

Extras

• In-app update notifications for new releases on GitHub
• Opening links in external browser

Roadmap

The current focus is to continue to expand on the general functionality of Thunder. This includes but is not limited to:

• Improvements to theming to allow for more theme choices
• Improvements to post/comment creation to reach parity with the web-ui
• Optimizations to make the overall experience even smoother
• Improved searching capabilities

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome! To contribute potential features or bug-fixes:

1. Fork this repository
2. Base the feature or fix off the develop branch. This is to allow for pre-release versions without affecting the main general releases.
3. Apply any changes and/or additions based off an existing issue (or create a new issue for the feature/fix you are working on)
4. Create a pull request to have your changes reviewed and merged

Building From Source

Installing Flutter and Related Dependencies

Thunder is developed with Flutter, and is built to support both iOS and Android. There may be unofficial support on other platforms but is not guaranteed at this time (Linux, Windows, MacOS)

To build the app from source, a few steps are required.

1. Set up and install Flutter. For more information, visit https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/install.
2. Clone this repository and fetch the dependencies using flutter pub get
3. Generate an empty .env file. The .env file holds any credentials. At the time of writing, en empty .env file with a comment is all that is required.
4. Run flutter gen-l10n to generate the localization files.
5. Optional: Run the build script using dart scripts/build.dart, which will build both the iOS and Android release versions. This step is only required if you want to build a release version of the app.

Building with Docker

Alternatively, you can skip the prerequisite setup and build the Android application via docker with a single command:

./scripts/docker-build-android.sh

Developing with Docker

You can also run your local development environment for Android via the Docker container, including connecting to ADB on the host machine.

./scripts/docker-dev-android.sh

Environment File

This is an example of the .env that can be used for Thunder.

# Empty Environment File

Conventions

While there are no specific conventions that must be followed, do try to follow best practices whenever possible.

Suggestions are always welcome to improve the code quality and architecture of the app!