Welcome to the last major release of the year. I will be taking a break from all software development until next year.
This release brings some more user requested features and general improvements to the app.
This was supposed to be the release that added local event tracking but I didn’t end up having enough time to finish it. So instead of holding up the release I am releasing with local event tracking turned off. There will be more information about this once local tracking is ready. tl;dr is a lot of user requested features require local event tracking.
Full changelog
- Add new FAB quick action - refresh posts.
- Add listing type search filters (eg. filter by local, moderator view, subscribed).
- Add feature to scroll post feed with volume rocker. Can be enabled in settings (Post feed). Default off.
- Add setting to turn off saving recent communities.
- Switch to use a different default user agent so the Summit client doesn’t look like a bot. This should fix network issues. If you encounter any new network errors after the release, please ping me!
- Improve performance of hide read by using API to hide some read posts.
Update
I made a mistake and didn’t switch to using the new user-agent everywhere. Will fix this in a patch release (v1.74.1).
- Use the new user-agent everywhere.
Can you check Settings > Misc > Client user-agent and make sure " Let the app decide" is selected? If that is selected and you are still getting errors can you try playing around with that setting? If you find a certain setting works please let me know which one so I can figure out a better user agent to use. Thank you.
I tried all the different user-agents, but unfortunately none worked. FWIW, although all images load on my browser on my main instance (lemmy.zip), and many fail in the app, switching to this lemmy.world account caused the image from the same post to load in the app without issue (using the flutter user-agent)
It looks like lemmy.zip started going full bleeding edge and started to encode all their images as AVIFs. Unfortunately at the time of writing AVIF support on Android is spotty at best. The images load in browsers because browsers have better image support but as a small indie developer I can’t add support for AVIFs by myself. In addition, the off the shelf decoders appear to be buggy and also huge. So, unfortunately there isn’t much I can do.
I’m pretty sure that this is a rendering error. Here’s two screenshots:
In this first one, I tapped on the post thumbnail to expand it. Not shown: The first time I expand the post it’ll show the image, and then replace it with the error after a fraction of a second.
The second image is from when I long press the thumbnail. It shows the image, but with the error overlaid.
Are you on Android 11 or below? It looks like a lot of instances have begun showing images in AVIF format. Unfortunately this file format is not supported by Android 11 and below. I wonder if this is what is causing a lot of these issues.
14, which still receives updates. Could it be a file size issue?
It seems unlikely. The reason why you still see the image is because posts typically have 2 images, a thumbnail (low resolution) and the source image (high resolution). When you tapped the post. You are first shown the thumbnail while the source images loads. This is why it looks like the images loads at first. In the full screen viewer the same thing happens. You are shown the thumbnail but the erro indicates that the source image failed to load. If you tap the “error details” button it should give you more information about the underlying cause.
Another updates on this. This image file is really weird. I downloaded the image and tried using a few other apps to few the image and non of them could load the file. I’m not sure if this is a bug with Summit or the file at this point since I downloaded the file using my browser and not Summit. Chrome was able to show the image but nothing else. I will dig deeper later today.
Update: the image loads on desktop. It looks like the built in AVIF decoder on Android doesn’t support the set of features used in this image. This is problematic because a standalone AVIF decoder is larger than the size of the app so the app size would double if I were to use a standalone AVIF decoder. Hopefully this can be fixed on the server side so I wont have to greatly increase the app size.
Thanks for the update! I agree, this sounds like a server problem then.
I’m still getting numerous of these unknown errors getpixel errors for images that load fine on the web and in bloorp. I played with the different client agents and nothing worked.
It’s likely bloorp bundled a standalone AVIF decoder which is why it loads there. It looks like the AVIF decoder bundled with Android is unable to decode the AVIF image as evident by the fact that 3/3 image viewers I tried failed to load the image (4 if you include Summit).