Lemmur Repository

• First released in January 2021
• Latest release was January 2022
• 13 total releases
• Currently in… stable/pre-stable?

Jerboa Repository

• First released in January 2022
• Latest release was March 2022
• 11 total releases
• Currently in alpha

Similarities

• Both have similar features (eg - login to Lemmy account, upvote, downvote, post, comment, subscribe to communities, DM, view notifications (not sure if both/either will notify you of notifications though), etc.)
• Both are under active development
• Both are available on the Google Play Store and f-droid
• Neither have advanced features such as WYSIWYG editor, customization/theming, etc.

Differences

• Lemmur is a Flutter app
  • It is a “native app”, but it isn’t written in Android’s native language of Java/Kotlin
  • Flutter is written in Dart and builds to a native app for the targeted platform(s) (in this case Android, Windows, and Linux)
  • The benefit of Flutter is that you can write one code base and target multiple platforms with the one code base, but at the expense of being confined to Flutter’s limitations
  • Flutter should be more performant than other “cross platform” development platforms, especially ones that essentially just bind a web app around native platform APIs
  • Kotlin does not support 3D apps as seen in apps such as advanced games
• Jerboa is a native Android only app written in Kotlin
  • Kotlin can be simplified as a more modern/newer version of Java
  • Kotlin became a native language for Android several years ago
  • Apps written in Kotlin will only be limited by the language itself (which usually has work around) or Android itself
  • The downside of writing an app in Kotlin is that the code base is essentially limited to Android so it cannot be released for other platforms like iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.
  • In theory, well written Kotlin apps should be smaller and less resource intensive than similarly well written Flutter apps, but the difference will likely be negligible unless on underpowered devices or if the app is extremely large/complex in nature
• Lemmur is led by the… community?
• Jerboa is made/led by @dessalines@lemmy.ml, a creator/maintainer of Lemmy

I’m sure others will have more to add than this simple overview. I would recommend trying both and seeing which you prefer. While both are suitable for daily use, neither are really feature complete at the moment. As long as both continue to receive steady updates or until one app receives some " killer" feature that the other doesn’t have and can’t implement for whatever reason, I don’t think there will be a clear winner that most people will recommend and it will just come down to personal preference. Who knows - maybe by the time that happens, it would be a different app that is heavily preferred by most users.

Jerbora drives me nuts because any time I have a typo I hit backspace and it removes the space after the previous word and keeps going further back in what ive typed if I accidentally hit backspace again.

From a non-technical standpoint, lemmur is very ugly and Jerboa is average.

Edit: downvoting doesn’t change the truth 😛