It's by far the best client for android.
Discussion
To each their own, I suppose. UX is definitely great, but hard to call it a “client,” strictly speaking.
It’s a solid Nostr app, but the best actual client on Android has to go to Amethyst, IMO. Coracle is pretty solid, too.
Thanks for the clarification on the client vs. UX.
Its been a while since I used amythest or coracle. When I tried them in the past they were notcibly slower than using Primal. It couldve been something to do with the phone I'm using. I'd be up for trying anything, as I feel that Primal itself is still a bit buggy and slow when compared with the big companies X etc... I use primal way more than X, but it has more to do with content and loving the idea of Zaps than experience.
Amethyst and Coracle will likely be a bit slower than Primal, just by the nature of the fact that they are actually reading from Nostr relays in real time, and some of those relays will be slower to respond than others. Additionally, if you have any of Amethyst's Tor privacy settings turned on, it will be a bit slower.
Primal apps, by contrast, don't read from relays at all. They only read from Primal's centralized caching server that aggregates notes from the relays, which is why it generally works a bit faster than other clients.
On Primal, therefore, you only see what they have configured their caching server to show you. They can censor anyone at any time simply by not aggregating their notes onto the caching server, so that no one who uses Primal will ever see them.
You give up nearly all of the censorship resistant properties of Nostr by using Primal, other than the fact that they DO write your notes to the relays listed in your Network settings.
And that is the distinction between being just an app with good UX vs being an actual Nostr client.
Nostr clients do the following things:
1. Fetch notes from Nostr relays.
2. Verify the signatures of those notes locally, to ensure that the content hasn't been manipulated.
3. Display the verified notes to the user.
4. Provide means for the user to write their own notes to Nostr relays after they have signed them with their own private key.
Primal only does 3 and 4 above, offloading 1 and 2 to their caching server. So it's a half-client.
Additionally, and possibly more egregiously, if a new user sticks with Primal's defaults, Primal will be in control of their entire Nostr experience. Primal will control what they see via their caching server, Primal will also be one of their handful of write relays, Primal will be their media server, and Primal will be their Lightning wallet.
The entire point of Nostr is to separate control of all of those things, so they are not controlled by a single company, like legacy social media. Any Nostr client worth their salt should separate the ownership and control of each of these elements by default. And while it is true that the user CAN change all of these defaults in Primal, most users will simply stick with the defaults. Technically someone can even select a different caching server than the one Primal runs... Except that no other options exist.
That is extremely helpful information for understanding the difference. It helps me understand the tradeoffs between the primal UX and clients.
I may try amythest and coracle again, but as user, simply looking for less sensored less algorithmic version of x. It seems that primal is my best option at the moment.
Just so that I understand the situation fully. If at somepoint primal does something I dont like, and I have been making sure to write to non-primal relays, I can simply move with my nsec to a client and still keep all of my posts and comments? I've seen this as one of the main attractions to nostr for me.
Yes. The Primal app IS writing your notes to Nostr relays, even though it doesn't read from them. If you go to any Nostr client, your notes, comments, follows and followers will all be there waiting for you.
I encourage you to try out various Nostr clients. Each one does things a bit differently and has certain strengths and weaknesses.
For instance, even though I rag on Primal a fair bit, I still use their advanced search feature quite a bit, because it helps me find a particular note I am looking for really easily. Yet, when it comes to searching for a particular user, I always use Coracle, because I know that it will give me the legit user, based on web-of-trust, as the first result, whereas other clients may surface an impostor as the top suggestion. If I want to browse a specific relay's feed, I can definitely do that in Coracle, but Jumble is a better experience for that. Then for direct messages I stick with 0xChat, as Primal only does NIP-04 messages and while Amethyst does NIP-04 and NIP-17, it still seems to miss some NIP-17 messages.