Why not release the devrant (mobile+web) client on github (and maybe gitlab for people that would actually contribute but are special about the usage of github) so people could contribute to it, leading to faster progress? I thought about it now for a bit and couldn't see any problems with that, since the current apk can be anyway unpacked via freely available tools (appcelerator doesn't make it too hard either anyway 😕) and the website/api isn't any secret either (see the 4000 clients getting patched together out of zombie like api calls)

@dfox @trogus @linuxxx

I've been saying this since it came out. a community full of devs but not making use of it. I know personally I would dedicate atleast 5 hours a week to it. I don't care if the code isn't anything impressive, which I don't think it should be since I figured how to make a fully distributed clone in one night. but at the same time I kind of understand why he doesn't, it would be too easy for other people to create devRant clones

@PerfectAsshole Same thing here, just not as much time as you could put towards it, yet still I would try to implement as much as possible (instead of just complaining or opening issues) if given the chance and would finally be a project I would love to actively contribute towards - regarding "clones", as said the full source of devrant can be decompiled or viewed, its not that hard, it's really no reason for not open sourcing it. I was also thinking more and more about just rolling my own app, but why have 5 million weird clones (we have those already and they are just as any other alternative clone [see twitter apps for example] either ugly but functional, or good looking but having the functions of a toaster ["it works"]), than rather just have the community fix the official things it screams about.

@PerfectAsshole Just checked: the github is right now at 145 open issues and most of it seems to be web/app related things.

@JoshBent yeah the only reason I don't make a clone is cause I like devRant despite it becoming like 9gag which the filters they are working on should fix that. well the fact that I like it and I have a belief that the people that first come up with the idea should profit as long as they are working on it

@PerfectAsshole They wouldn't lose any money through that though, just like they are not getting any from the official app nor the alternative clients done by the community, they are rather open to their community creating things around the platform and making it run across all kind of things like recently somebody made a client in minecraft and someone else did one on an esp8266 (hope I got that right, always forget the name) - I am all in to support them, since they made devrant happen, but a client won't hurt.

@PerfectAsshole Theres a ton of people that could contribute and help, even if its just small fixes - each one would be one dfox or trogus just have to review instead of spend time on after work on implementing.

@JoshBent yeah true, the problem is that alot of wanted features would require server side systems, there's alot more in the devRant apk than is showing right now, it's just missing the client and server side code, so creating a community made dev rant app doesn't solve any problems unfortunately or trust me I would have already started on one months ago

@PerfectAsshole As I said above most is client side problems, design, layout, refreshing content automatically etc.

@JoshBent you're a front-end dev? I'm just figuring cause we both see a different set of problems haha

@PerfectAsshole I am both, how would that change anything though, since my points are still related to the client side 😉

@JoshBent it doesn't change anything, just asking cause most things I see are server side and even though I'm full stack myself, I lean towards backend and sysadmin so that's probably why I notice those problems more than frontend

@PerfectAsshole I guess you do, since by quickly scrolling through the "Android" tag I found already 12 issues that are related to the client

So a few things here. (And just to note, we do really appreciate the willingness to help).

First off, don’t be deceived by the number of issues open in our GitHub issue tracker. 90 of those are labeled as features. We’ve left them open, in many cases, as a courtesy to the person who added them and to try to allow for some discussion. Needless to say, many of them we’d likely never want to implement and just because someone suggests something, it doesn’t mean it’s warranted and no matter how many people you have working on a project, you should still limit how many features you add to a product. Bad features are worse than limited features, IMO.

Next, bugs. Less than half of the issues. Unfortunately, the sad truth is many aren’t easily fixable and in some cases in the case of the SDK we use they might not be fixable at all without considerable amounts of work. That’s not to say the community couldn’t be helpful in some cases in fixing them, but if they are opened at this point, many of them probably require pretty intricate knowledge of Titanium and very, very few people are going to be able to dive into the source code and fix them without some guidance from me.

And that’s not a shot at anyone else, it’s just speaking to the nature of Titanium, finickyness on Android, and the overall semi-messiness of the code.

Open sourcing an app is, in no way, a win-win no-negatives effort. Open sourcing the app would require us to now manage an open source project, coordinate everything we do with contributors, review code, manage every issue worked on to make sure efforts don’t collide, etc. And that doesn’t even take into account backend work that would be required for various things like @PerfectAsshole points out.

So while it might have merits, I think these are important things to think about and we really appreciate the willingness to help, but it’s not a matter of “open source the project and watch the bugs go away” because there’s much more to it.

@dfox Thanks for giving such a detailled answer and speaking out on it! :)

So the main problem is that its written in titanium and porting it would take too much time I believe right? I looked at titanium and the difference to more known things like ionic/phonegap and I feel it would have been much easier to use it to develop the app (especially for layout problems which are patched for atl. 12ish months in both as much as I could see) - but porting it now would be a suggestion which would just explode your time even further, which would go against the base idea.

Handling the PRs could indeed actually get to be lot of work as you said and as of right now I can't add anything to that, but will give it more thought.

And I do agree that the app shouldn't get too bloated, I love the simplicity and design (except for little eyescratcher I have, but might just add an issue for that) of it, but theres things that always could still be added and are mass requested often.

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@dfox My phone died so the first paragraph is attached as an image.

As the cut off text says, I have an idea for which I would like your opinion on; what is your actual official view on devrant clients? both android and web? since I think and hope that you are as open about it as described above, but would you actually strike down an app or webapp that is developed for devrant?

@JoshBent thanks, we appreciate that.

I’m definitely open to hearing ideas. As for clients, as you’ve probably seen, devRantron is a great open source desktop app that is a great effort and we definitely support.

For Android, while we allow people to develop apps for personal use, we don’t allow any devRant clients/apps to be submitted to the Play Store for a number of reasons, the main one being security and avoiding confusion for users looking to download the app.

As for the web app - what are you looking for exactly? We have a completely overhauled web app that is a few weeks away from being launched.

What I’d be curious about, is for the Android app specifically, what are your biggest pain points? What can we do faster/what bugs have been lingering an unacceptably long amount of time that you think should have been fixed already? We really want to try to avoid that happening either way and if there’s ones we’re missing we definitely want to hear about it.

But another thing to keep in mind, is we created the issue tracker a few months ago so it pretty much received every issue ever discovered in a matter of a month. I think we’re cutting through them at a pretty good pace and we haven’t even gotten to the point which we plan to do where we take a few weeks for just bugs.

But I am interested in what you think there.

@dfox It seems like I just should wait before actually firing any more rants or ideas about it, since you did address the most painful thing on github: no statusbar, no navbar, fullscreen layout - since currently it just cuts off and doesnt actually fully scale (basically preventing me from switching phones.. 😅) - you said there would be an update, just not yet when that would be roughly and the webapp is a special thing of its own - it lacks a lot, but I am excited to hear that you are actually near to a new webapp, which I am sure might solve all annoyances anyway.

Thanks again for being so open on it.

@JoshBent no problem, and thanks for the feedback. I’ll try to look at the layout after our next release which should be in a week or two. I think you’ll like the new app - it’s actually a real web app and I think it looks pretty awesome, @trogus has been working for a long time on it.

@dfox Can't wait until it gets released! 😊