I know it's been a while since the last Thunder general release, but the wait is finally over! There have been many improvements, additions, changes and fixes in this release which should make for a even better Thunder experience.

A reminder for anyone who didn’t catch the previous announcements, Thunder is now officially available on Google Play and on the App Store! You should also be able to search up Thunder on the Play Store/App Store to find it. For more details about the launch, see the following posts:

• Google Play Announcement: https://lemmy.world/post/1631968
• App Store Announcement: https://lemmy.world/post/2926034

If you are using the Google Play version or App Store version, please note that it may take a bit of time before you receive the update. As always, this is an alpha release, so do expect bugs to pop up here and there. Now onto the update notes. This update brings a few major features:

• Complete overhaul of the Floating Action Buttons (FAB) - contributions from @CTalvio and @micahmo
  • You can swipe up from the FAB to show a list of extended actions to perform
  • You can customize your FAB actions within the new settings page for FABs
  • You can customize short and long press actions for the FAB in the feed/post views. Changing the short press action will change the default FAB action.
• Complete overhaul of the Create Post screen - contribution from @coslu
  • All markdown text and preview icons are now at the bottom for better accessibility
  • Link previews show up when adding a new link when creating the post
• Inbox badges - you will now be able to see if you have any unread inbox items when you first launch Thunder, or when you switch accounts. This is an initial feature that will be improved upon in the future to give more frequent updates when you receive new notifications
• Overall improvements to the UI - contribution from @CTalvio, @micahmo, @tom-james-watson and others!
  • Improved post badges to indicate images, text, links better
  • Improvements to how read posts are shown in the feed for better contrast/readability
  • Improvements to performance when loading the feed and external image thumbnails
  • Domains now show up on the post to indicate where the link will take you

And much much more. I can't go through all the changes in the changelog, but for those who are curious, feel free to check out the full changelog on GitHub.

We have a Matrix space if you would like to join in on discussions: https://matrix.to/#/#thunderapp:matrix.org

If you find any issues or would like to suggest features, please open up a new issue! As always, contributions are always welcomed here.

As always, I would just like to thank everyone so far for the amazing support so far. Thunder is still a project that I can only work on the side, and it has been incredible so far. A lot of my time has been taken up to work on improvements to Thunder, and to maintain active and meaningful conversations to improve the overall experience for Thunder.

If you would like to show a token of appreciation, you can buy me a coffee! The donations will help support some of the development overhead costs (e.g., apple developer program for TestFlight builds) and other costs!

• https://ko-fi.com/hjiangsu
• https://en.liberapay.com/hjiangsu/

Thanks again for everything so far, and I hope you enjoy this update!