Mobile apps are of growing interest to the fediverse. While users have asked for apps since the very early days of the fediverse, the presence of stable APIs and capable developers has turned those requests into reality.

PeerTube’s own APIs are starting to reach maturity, and developers are working to incorporate them into new apps that people can use on the go. One such app is called Thorium, which is currently in Beta and is “currently missing a lot of features” according to the lead developer.

As far as watching videos is concerned, the app works pretty well. The client ships with a simple video player by default, but an experimental WebTorrent player is also available in the settings. Unfortunately, that particular player isn’t terribly stable, and introduces longer wait times just to get the video to play.

Although Thorium allows users to log into their PeerTube accounts, the features are a little bare at the moment. You can’t really do much with your account other than like or dislike videos, and the client won’t be able to supporting commenting until a future release supports it. Additionally, you can’t upload any videos with the client yet.

Still, it’s a nice freshman effort, and hopefully the app will get updated to account for all of the new improvements that have come into PeerTube since its 2.0.0 release.

You can try out the Thorium client here:

• Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.schueller.peertube
• F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.schueller.peertube/

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