The good things about my Mastodon clients

For a few years I was a happy and fulfilled user of the iPhone app Metatext, a client for the federated social network Mastodon. When Metatext stopped being developed, I spent days reading comparisons, trying other clients, and settled on two which eventually matched all of my criteria:

1. Ice Cubes for Mastodon (free), an open source, collaborative, SwiftUI Mastodon client made by @dimillian
2. Ivory for Mastodon by Tapbots (subscription), a Mastodon Client for iOS & Mac.

I donate 0,99€ per month to the developer of Ice Cubes for Mastodon, and I pay the yearly subscription for Ivory (which costs 1,50€ per month.)

There are a 8 features specific to #IceCubesApp and 7 features specific to #ivory that I am really keen about. Since neither implemented them all, I continue to use both.

Ice Cubes	Ivory
Quote post transforms the quoted post into a card with embedded content	Boost/favorite from/as a different account
Featured hashtags surfaced on our own profile + clicking them filters only our own posts using that hashtag (Ivory’s implementation in v. 1.7)	Label in the timeline to denote posts displayed as a result of following a hashtag (Ice Cubes implements it as of 2023-12-04)
Add/edit filters via our own profile	App-integrated statistics for the rolling week, with bar graphs, directly in the tray
Private messages button in the tray	Ungrouped notifications
Filtering notifications in the notifications pane	Date format choice between relative & absolute (I’m a sucker for the latter)
Collapse long posts	Option to get a missing Alt text reminder
Auto-detect language when posting	Can send iPhone “stickers”
Displays all posts for a given followed hashtag (whereas Ivory apparently displays only a portion)