Whenever I hear about an app that promises to perform a ton of different, specialized functions, all in one interface, I get a bit worried. Most times, this means an app that does many things poorly, instead of one thing well. This is especially true in the social media ecosystem, where every network has different affordances and customs. I've tried a few of these all in one apps, and strongly disliked one or more things about them. But I keep being tempted to try the next one. It really would be helpful to combine multiple functions in to one, both from a usability perspective, and to save on subscription fees.

It turns out that I'm glad I didn't give up on the category, because at least for me, skyscraper is finally the one! First and most importantly, it has an engaged and active developer, who's present on the social networks he supports, and obviously dogfoods his own software. After sending him some feedback, I heard back in under 30 minutes, was given access to the testflight, and my feedback was in the next beta release. On top of that, all of my feedback items were refinements on an already excellent voiceover experience. The developer has obviously considered accessibility since the beginning, and done an excellent job in spite of not using a screen reader himself. That alone was enough for me to subscribe. But is skyscraper right for you, too? Let's go through the apps I'm replacing, and I'll compare and contrast, so you can judge for yourself.

First of all, bluesky. This is the flagship network Skyscraper supports, and is where it really shines. If you want to be on Bluesky as a blind user, skyscraper is the way to do it, hands down. The official bluesky app continues to have showstopping accessibility issues. The option I'm replacing, called Skeets, is the other accessible choice. However, Skyscraper has a far more mature and advanced accessibility experience. The only things I miss from skeets are support for other app views like eurosky, blacksky, and northsky. But logging into my selfhosted PDS worked perfectly, and was just as smooth an experience as I could ask for. Skyscraper also has all of the features you'd expect from a modern social media app: translation, timeline searching and filtering, a share extension, a browser extension to open bluesky links inside skyscraper, position syncing via icloud, and so on.

But where Skyscraper starts to really shine is when you add a Mastodon (or other compatible) account. Although the server I use is iceshrimp, everything worked perfectly. Once you have two accounts, though, you can turn on and configure a unified feed. The unified feed shows all of the posts from all of your accounts together, and lets you read and interact with them from a single timeline. When you reply, repost, like, and so-on, it picks the right account and does the right thing based on the post you're interacting with. You can also post to multiple accounts at the same time in the compose interface. If you want to be active on both networks, this is a huge win! You can also look at each feed separately; the unified feed is only an option, not a choice that's forced on you. The Mastodon app I'm replacing is Mona. Even after the Mona 7 rewrite, I've had a bunch of frustrations with the app I've used for years. First, it still won't use streaming support on my instance. Skyscraper seems to, no problem. Second, focus continues to jump around when leaving and returning to Mona. Some of this is apple voiceover bugs, but some of this is absolutely something about how Mona is building it's list of posts. I'm glad to say that Skyscraper doesn't have this problem nearly as often. Sometimes voiceover jumps me way back in the list, but this is a voiceover issue, nothing the skyscraper developer can fix. When I first tried the app, a few critical features were missing for me, though. First, it was not possible to read post authors via only username or only display name. Second, you couldn't customize what information voiceover read out for each post, or reorder it. Third, you couldn't have content warnings automatically expand. I'm happy to say that in the testflight version, all of these things are fixed! They'll be out in the next release on the app store. The only other thing Skyscraper is missing is the ability to use apple intelligence to generate image descriptions when posting. This isn't a dealbreaker for me, though. For my purposes, Skyscraper is an equal or better experience on Mastodon and the fediverse than Mona. And as much as I hate to sound like a penny-pinching scrooge, Skyscraper is cheaper. It's hard out there, and that really matters!

The last big feature Skyscraper offers is the ability to read websites via RSS, standard.site, and a bunch of other API's. Smartly, the developer didn't try to jam these into the unified feed. The app offers a separate reader tab, that's optimized for consuming long-form content. This gives all of the advantages of a single app, without trying to force incompatible content types to comfortably live together. Again, though, when I first picked up the app, it was missing a big feature for me: syncing with Miniflux. However, the developer added that, and it's working in testflight already. In fact, adding it is even smoother than it was in Lire, the app I'm replacing. Skyscraper only needs a single Miniflux API key, whereas Lire needs two or three. However, using Skyscraper as a Lire replacement is the one area where your needs may differ from mine. Skyscraper offers excellent support for displaying, reading, saving, filtering, and interacting with RSS feed items. However, it does not cache articles offline, cache images and media, or attempt to retrieve full text articles. In my case, this was actually a win. I have miniflux configured to retrieve full text, and if I didn't configure things carefully, Lire's full text feature and Miniflux's full text feature could conflict with one another. I'm never offline enough to care about article caching, so that wasn't a big loss for me. But if you don't already use Miniflux, and are just storing RSS feeds locally on your phone, Lire gets the win, here. Skyscraper does support adding feeds from youtube, tumblr, and some other sources that Lire does not. But full text is a massive feature advantage for Lire, unless you're like me and use miniflux already. But if you use Miniflux and don't care about offline caching, replacing Lire with Skyscraper is completely possible.

Skyscraper also has a bunch of other nice to have features that aren't present in the apps I'm replacing: account stats, a weekly catch-up, server statistics, a terminal client, trending hashtags, and more. However, I haven't spent enough time with the client to have much to say about these. My primary focus was making sure I could do everything in Skyscraper that I could with my previous apps, and then canceling three subscriptions and replacing them with a single one. It turns out that I can!

Skyscraper is an actively developed app, with a constant stream of new features, a reasonable subscription price, and a developer who listens. I would strongly encourage anyone who is already on Mastodon or Bluesky, or who wants to be on either, to download it from the app store and give it a try. The free features are more than enough to determine if you like it, and the subscription to unlock pro (currently on sale for $12.99) is more than reasonable.

Also posted on the fediverse.

Also posted on Bluesky.