The best Mastodon client now has an iOS version!

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TL;DR: I've just released an iOS version of Phanpy on the App Store and AltStore. It provides better performance and a Liquid Glass icon compared to the installed web app.

Now, if you want some more context...

Context

If you're reading this, chances are you already know what Mastodon (or the Fediverse) is. If you don't, the gist of it is that they're people-owned social media; a bunch of different websites that talk to each other as if they were all the same thing. It's really nice, and has garnered a lot of interesting people over the years.

One of the best perks of Mastodon is that there's a bazillion ways to use it. Even though there are official apps (and they're pretty good), there's also a ton of 3rd party ones that do an excellent job of satisfying many usage niches. I've used a few, but one of them has always stood out: Phanpy.

Phanpy is a web client for Mastodon developed by Chee Aun, and it's easily become my favorite way to use it. It's not only pretty and kinda soothing, but it packs a bunch of UX touches that actually make a difference.

It is a web client though, and while on desktop it provides a top-notch experience (and probably on Android too), on iOS the experience was less than ideal, because Apple hates web apps (and the web in general). While you can install Phanpy as a full-screen web app via Safari, it has significant performance limitations, keeps reloading when in the background, and now with iOS 26, can't have adaptive icons to fit in with other apps.

Which is why I decided to take advantage of Phanpy's open source code, wrap it in a native package for iOS, and distribute it as an iOS app!

About Phanpy

Phanpy is a web client for Mastodon developed by Chee Aun, and it's easily become my favorite way to use it. It's not only pretty and kinda soothing, but it packs a bunch of UX touches that actually make a difference.

These touches can be small, but make all the difference. For example, whenever your timeline includes a reply to another post, Phanpy will show a preview of the post being replied to (something that is challenging to do on chronological feeds):

Some can be also small, but very opinionated, like the fact that Alt text is automatically displayed below an image (if it's short enough to fit in there). This highlights how alt text is not just for vision-impaired users; it's also a way to provide context to the images, or draw attention to the thing you specifically wanted to highlight.

But the UX touches can also be big: one of my favorites is “Catch-up”, perfect for when you haven't opened the app in a while and want to see if you've missed anything important or want to quickly check posts by the people you care about the most. You choose a period of time and Phanpy will grab all the posts from that period and display them in a highly filterable view.

In the screenshot below, I'm seeing the posts from my timeline from the past 8 hours:

These are definitely not all the nice touches in there, just my favorites. Definitely check out the main Phanpy website to learn about the rest.

Since Phanpy is open source and under the MIT license, this means I could create a fork of it and add whatever changes are necessary to get it to work as an installable iOS app (I did get Chee Aun's blessing for doing this, though, as I felt it was polite to ask). Why is what I did: this is iPhanpy's source code, which I try to keep as up-to-date as possible with the main one.

The repo explains the technical side of the implementation in case you're curious.

Download links

FAQs

Why not just use the web app?

While the installed web app (PWA) on iOS is perfectly usable, in my experience it has a few annoyances:

• It almost always fully reloaded when I opened it, meaning opening the web app would usually result in a blank screen for a couple seconds. This happens because iOS doesn't keep websites in memory as long as it keeps apps;
• Scrolling would sometimes get stuttery, even on a recent iPhone. iOS limits how much juice web apps get, so Phanpy wasn't as smooth as it could be;
• Visual glitches: I use my phone on an auto light/dark mode depending on time of day, and the status bar (the bar behind the clock/battery icon) would often get stuck in the wrong color;
• The home screen icon doesn't adapt to the light/dark/clear modes, meaning Phanpy always stood out in a bad way.

As I said, these were mostly annoyances, not dealbreakers. Still, iPhanpy fixes all of those.

Android version?

Technically, it's possible to make one, yes. It wasn't a priority for me because I don't use Android (and don't have a device to test with), but I'm not saying it won't happen. I just need time and volition to work on it. Maybe once I get a bit more comfortable with keeping the iOS one up-to-date.

If you know a little about Capacitor and how to build/test Android apps, feel free to try it and open a PR with your findings!

I can't log in to my instance!

I'm aware that logging in to some specific instances is not working on the iOS app, even though it works on the web app. I'm looking into it. What I know so far is that it seems to be related to either an older Mastodon version (< 4.3.0) or to some specific security settings being enabled/disabled. It will be fixed in a future update.

Update: this issue has been resolved in version 1.5.2. Make sure you're running the latest version!

Who do I report issues to?

If you're using the installed version, iPhanpy, then probably to me. You can do it either on the GitHub repo if you have an account there, or just shoot me a message on my Mastodon account.

For feature requests, it's better to do it on the original project's repo.

Keep in mind that Phanpy and iPhanpy are hobby projects to both of us and we have no obligation to work on your issue. Be sensible.