For some time now, people in the fediverse have expressed a desire for a dedicated Pixelfed app. The federated photo-sharing platform continues to explode in popularity, as new instances continue to open up, and the amount of users sharing photos to the fediverse increases. To date, relatively few dedicated clients have existed for Pixelfed. FediLab can serve as a capable client, but many people desire a tailored experience for the platform specifically.

The PixelDroid project intends to rectify this by providing a full experience to people on the go. In honor of the fediverse being 12 years old, the app developer has pushed out an alpha release for users to preview. The developer was cautious to set expectations about the current alpha quality:

Broken things related to API problems: search repeats results, likes/shares don’t work correctly, can’t click on a hashtag to see a list of posts with that hasthag, can’t see comments, 2FA-protected accounts cannot be used (of course these things could also be broken client-side, but that’s more of an academic question at this point)

Broken things that might be solved with changes server-side: thumbnails saying “no preview available” sometimes (more debugging is needed to pinpoint the problem)

You can install the APK directly through the release announcement, compile it from source, or make use of a dedicated F-Droid repository while efforts are underway for official packaging in F-Droid proper. In the meantime, we’ve included a gallery of alpha screenshots below!