Voyager. It economizes on screen real estate, and has similar (therefore, familiar to me) ergonomics as Relay did back at the old place.
Tight design that stays out of the way, and updates frequently.
I’m biased because I chat a lot with the developers, but I’d highly recommend Thunder - very sleek, very customizable, VERY nice compact mode, and a very welcoming group of people. If you try it and feel like something big is missing, they’re quite responsive on github! Been quite impressed with the leaps they’ve made with features on every release.
Thunder is a great mix of functions and UI. The compact mode is really great.
Thunder does look quite nice, but sadly my long defunct keyboard app doesn’t work with it, and they weren’t able to get the apk to test a fix for it. (But they did try.) You’d think, of all things, a keyboard and input field wouldn’t have compatibility issues, but I guess that’s Android for ya.
Oh, that’s a bummer :( what happens when you try to use it?
This is me typing “hello”, so it seems like it duplicates all the characters typed so far every time I add a character.
Aw man, that’s too bad :/ what keyboard is it?
It’s called Kii. You can still get a version from a 3rd party site since it hasn’t been on the play store for years.
I’m not sure how much I trust those apk sites, (so downloader beware!) but you can at least see the screenshots: https://www.apk4fun.com/apps/com.zl.inputmethod.latin/
I don’t think it’s anything earth shattering, but it’s kinda nice, and fairly minimal, and it’s what I’m used to, so I’m happy with it.
Have you tried other options like AnySoftKeyboard or HeliBoard (fork of OpenBoard)
I’m pretty sure you’ll like AnySoftKeyboard, it’s pretty minimal and similar to your current keyboard. And it works with Thunder.
You can still submit a bug report for Thunder not working with Kii, I’m pretty sure the Thunder devs would be willing to fix this.
Thunder because I think it has the most features, the UI is designed pretty well and I like the user experience it offers. They are working on amazing new features like notifications over UnifiedPush and moderation tools (I think no other app has mod tools). It’s completely free and open-source and available on F-Droid via the IzzyOnDroid repository. And unlike Sync, it doesn’t have ads.
I recently also learned that it’s one of the few open-source (and still actively maintained and developed) Lemmy apps, which is quite sad. I don’t understand why so many folks use proprietary apps like Litoff, Summit, Connect, Boost or Sync. Sync is especially bad, because it has ads and trackers.
I tried Jerboa before I switched to Thunder and hated it, it just feels like an incomplete and buggy mess with poor UI/UX.