The best Mastodon apps that work with other federated social media

Mastodon is a unique social media experience. It’s a series of servers all working together to give you the whole experience. Each part of the Mastodon is an instance of itself, completely separate from the other instances, but still part of the whole. This must be something different. The premise is young, but there are some decent apps to get you online. Here are the best Mastodon apps for Android. Most of them work with other federated social networks like Plemora, Pixelfed, Peertube, Friendica and others.

It’s worth noting that Mastodon is fairly new to the social media space and has only just started to gain momentum thanks to the Twitter controversy of late. The apps here are definitely not as polished as third-party Twitter or Reddit apps.

AndStatus is a free and open source application. It supports Mastodon, Twitter, ActivityPub, GNU Social, and Pump.io. It has a rather basic UI, but it’s more than adequate for viewing and posting stuff on any of those networks. The app also features a unified timeline where you can see posts from all of those places in one place. Some of its other features include a conversation view, a global search that searches all the networks you’re logged into, and the ability to back up and restore your data.

The app can be a bit clunky at times, and there’s a bit of a learning curve to it. We think this one could use more polish. It’s functional, but a dedicated Mastodon client might serve you better.

Fedi (not to be confused with Fedilab) is a client of Plemora and Mastodon. This is another simple client with enough features to interact with the instances without too much trouble. Its features include support for emoji reactions, push notifications, the ability to upload almost any type of media file, multi-account support and DM support. This one is still a work in progress with just getting things like dark mode. However, there is enough potential here to recommend it to people.

Fedilab is a solid client for Mastodon, Plemora, Peertube, GNU Social, and Friendica. It’s one of the cleaner clients with a nice UI and decent support. Some of the features include multi-account support, scheduling posts, message bookmarks, translation features, and the ability to sort timelines by things like videos. This is an open source application and you can see the code here if you like. There are a few bug reports here and there, but nothing serious.

Husky for Plemora

Price: Free

Husky for Plemora is a lightweight user client for Plemora, Mastodon and anything else that uses the Mastodon API. It works for Mastodon, but includes some extra features specific to Plemora. It includes a clean UI, most of the basic functionality, and is open source. There are a few little things we’d like to see. For example, at the time of writing, Husky does not open Mastodon links by default. Other than minor issues like that, it works great, especially if you use Plemora and Mastodon.

Natives are the wild card for our list of Mastodon apps. It’s relatively new and hasn’t seen many downloads yet. However, it seems to have a nice feature set. They include multi-account support, all the basic posting features, draft saving support, multiple image uploads, and you can even post your location if you want. Clean UI with Material Design and all the login options we tried are working. There are bugs without a doubt, so here’s hoping the developers continue to make improvements.

Subway tooters

Price: Free

Subway Tooter is one of the rising Mastodon apps. This app supports multiple accounts and various settings. The UI isn’t the prettiest and there’s a bit of a learning curve. However, it supports most of the features you need for Mastodon. The best part is the ability to switch between instances by simply swiping from one column to the next. You can also customize the columns to show things like hashtags, blocked users, and more. Again, there’s a learning curve and it’s not the best view, but it works well.

Tusky for the Mastodons

Price: Free

Tusky is one of the most popular Mastodon apps. This includes a clean UI, support for most media file types, custom emojis, a dark theme, drafting features, and even uses Material Design guidelines. This was one of the first Mastodon apps that people tried, and many continue to use it. There have been many complaints about some Mastodon instances not being available because the developers didn’t like them. I didn’t experience any of that during my testing, but it’s something people don’t seem to like about the app.

This is, in my opinion, the best Mastodon app in the Play Store right now. It got the most development and seems to have the most features, along with the best UI. There is a nightly version (Google Play link) by a different developer if you want to live on the edge.

Wider

Price: Free / Up to $1.99

Twidere is one of the best Twitter clients and it also happens to support Mastodon. The app features a clean Material Design UI, ability to schedule posts, support for most media file types, and much more. This worked better for Twitter than it did for Mastodon. So, it’s a better choice for people who use Twitter a bit more and just want to try Mastodon to see what it’s like. Developers have a habit of releasing updates that break things, but when they work, they work great.

Yuito is Tusky’s fork. Look, act and feel the same in many ways. The app includes a clean UI, streaming functionality for each timeline, restricted mode for mobile networks to avoid data usage, and a few minor tweaks from the main Tusky app. The Google Play page is in Japanese, but the app is in English so you don’t have to worry. It also supports Pixelfed, Plemora and other networks that use the Mastodon API.

Bonus: Mastodon App on F-Droid

Price: Free

F-Droid is a popular third-party app store mostly for power users. Everything there is open source and home to some decent Mastodon apps that you can’t find on Google Play. They include MouseApp, Twitlatte (linked on the button), Husky, Librem Social (Tusky fork). MouseApp in particular is pretty good if you have needs that go beyond the norm. You have to download F-Droid and install it, then search for this app and install it from there.

If we missed any great Mastodon apps, let us know in the comments. You can also click here to see our list of the latest Android apps and games.

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