I like to keep things as minimal as possible on my phone. If there’s a web version of something, nine times out of ten, that’s what I’m using. Reddit, Miniflux, Fark, Lemmy, Micro.blog (with the assistance of OutPost for publishing, of course), Tumblr, and any forums I’m on; the website is almost always the best way to go for me.

I don’t like having a bunch of apps running background tasks if I don’t need them to. And yeah, I could turn off Background App Refresh, but I’d rather leave it on and keep the number of apps I use to a minimum.

But there are two really great ones constantly fighting for my home screen.

Skyscraper Social

I’ve used Skyscraper on and off over the last few months, but I didn’t go all in and purchase a yearly subscription until after the big update that introduced the new icon design from IconFactory. The developer behind it has been rolling out massive updates pretty regularly, and it’s honestly one of the best social media apps I’ve ever used.

Custom themes, full native Liquid Glass support, automatic translations, Mastodon and Micro.blog support, and even a built-in RSS reader.

It does a lot.

It’s like an omni-app for most of the things someone might do online. It’s cool, and I have been reading my Micro.blog feed through the app a lot lately. I don’t use Mastodon, so I don’t really care about the support there, but I can see how useful that would be for people with a presence across both spaces.

I wouldn’t dare put my nearly 300 RSS feeds into something like this, though. Every time I’ve tried that with one of these “everything apps,” it ends up crashing or making everything laggy as shit when all I want to do is refresh my social media feeds.

To be fair, I haven’t tried Skyscraper’s RSS feature, so I have no reason to believe that would happen here. I just think my Miniflux server is probably better suited for the job.

I get the appeal, though. The open web is getting bigger, and I think there are probably a lot of people discovering RSS and other finished technologies from the old days for the first time. Most people aren’t going to spin up a server running Miniflux or FreshRSS just to read the news. Having everything available in one beautifully designed app is a hell of a solution, and Skyscraper makes it easy.

That being said, for someone like me, I’d rather keep things separated.

We spend all this time preaching about the importance of decentralization across social networks. ATProto doesn’t have to be controlled by a single entity, and neither does ActivityPub. Having everything accessible through one app doesn’t undermine any of that, but I still like the idea of keeping my different online activities in different places.

It’s not like I would lose access to my Micro.blog account or RSS feeds or Bluesky if Skyscraper suddenly vanished. I’m just not crazy about having a single gateway into every platform I frequent online, you know?

This might be a little cheesy, but the web browser is my favorite app. My favorite iOS app is literally just Safari. You could give me a phone that only runs the phone app, camera, messages, email, and Safari, and my experience wouldn’t change very much.

Skyscraper is designed beautifully, natively, and it feels like it’s adding more features every day. I don’t doubt Cameron Banga’s ability to develop a great fucking app. He’s already done that.

I just get a little cautious when one app tries to do everything. As much as I appreciate what Skyscraper is doing, I like to keep things minimal whenever I can.

Enter Flux

Flux is constantly stealing me back from Skyscraper.

It, too, just had a massive update where it went fully native on iOS. It’s not using a cross-platform UI toolkit; it’s built for iOS, with real Liquid Glass instead of a knockoff. It looks fucking great. I could go on a whole rant about how much I dislike cross-platform apps that feel like a 1:1 Android port, with Material Design and all, but I’ll leave that alone.

The icon leaves a lot to be desired, but I try not to judge a book by its cover. I do fucking love a well-designed icon, though, and I have mad respect for anything IconFactory has touched.

But anyway.

It doesn’t have an RSS reader, Micro.blog, or Mastodon support. It doesn’t have Skyscraper’s level of theme customization, although it does offer preset colors, alternate icons, and layout options. And unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be very popular. At the time of writing this, it’s sitting at just eight App Store ratings.

It’s a sleeper, for sure.

What scares me about an excellent app with so few users is the possibility that the developer will eventually get bored and move on. I hope that doesn’t happen here, because Flux is every bit as good as Skyscraper, just for different reasons.

It does everything I want a Bluesky app to do. It shows me all of my Bluesky feeds in an elegant, minimalist interface, and I love that.

There are a couple of little things that make a big difference, too. Skyscraper always picks up wherever you left off in your feeds, loading new posts above what you’ve already seen. I don’t always want that. Sometimes I just want to open the app and see the latest posts without scrolling up through everything I’ve missed. Flux lets me turn that behavior off and start with the newest posts instead.

And I can swipe left and right between my feeds in Flux, which is something Skyscraper doesn’t offer. It’s such a simple thing, but it makes navigating between feeds feel so much better.

That’s really the appeal for me. Skyscraper does a whole lot of things exceptionally well, but Flux is focused on doing one thing exceptionally well. Sometimes that’s all I want.

To circle back to the thing about omni-apps: I get app fatigue when I spend too much time in one place. Everything starts to blur together, and eventually I just need to take a break from the app. I have nowhere else to go when I get everything in one place, however elegant and beautifully designed.

I’d rather get my news in one place, read blogs I’m following in another, publish to my own blog from an app over here, and check social media somewhere else.

And that’s probably why, no matter how impressed I am with Skyscraper, I keep finding myself back in Flux.

This is actually a very good problem to have: multiple apps fighting for your attention. It means people are innovating and building, and it’s indie developers doing it instead of us having to decide which corporate bullshit we’d rather use, like Threads or X.com.

The platform is already there, and it has an open API. Developers can build different experiences on top of it, and we get to decide which one works best for us.

Reddit is killing its RSS feeds and winding down public API access, so I went back to not using it at all. Something I probably should’ve stuck with when #FuckSpez was trending a couple of years ago. Some third-party clients, like Narwhal, have arrangements that let them keep running, but that’s kind of the point: they’re dependent on Reddit allowing it.

Twitter did the same thing to third-party apps, even before Elon’s villainous, barrel-chested ass took it over.

Enshittification 101 will tell you the plan is always to build something people love, get them hooked to the point where they’re so invested they wouldn’t dream of moving somewhere else, and then lock it all down so they have to use it however some shitass CEO wants them to.

Bluesky is supposed to be resistant to that, but I can’t be completely sure it’ll never succumb to it. I’m talking about Bluesky the company, though, not the entire ATProto network.

I’m absolutely loving how many great apps there are, all approaching Bluesky differently. You can use the official client, Anisota, Klearsky, Skyscraper Social, Flux, and a ton of others, and you’re going to get a different experience with every one of them. And there’s even cool retro shit like Skyspace that serves your Bluesky feeds through the lens of the early 2000s.

I like minimal on-ramps to social media. That’s why I keep coming back to Flux. But that’s just today. Tomorrow I might use Skyscraper or Anisota. Next week I might uninstall both and use the official client for a couple of weeks. The biggest thing for me is the freedom to choose how I want to talk to the people who live in my phone.