This is my entry to the esteemapp competition
I have been a guy that believes that whatever a PC can do, my mobile can do even better. I joined steemit late December 2017 and the first thing I noticed was that my computer can open steemit.com from my phone's hotspot but whenever I tried opening the same web page using my phone's browser, I get a “connection not private” error message on my phone. I wasn’t the only one that complained about this issue. This made me carry my laptop most of the time and saying it was really inconveniencing is an understatement.
I went to play store in search of browsers that can bypass my certificate related issues cause I am using Samsung galaxy note 4 and I have not updated my phone's certificate cause it is a very tedious process though I heard this will not solve my problem, but all the browsers I got gave me the same error message. Then I decided to search for "steemit" on the search bar and I got many steemit related apps, mostly "how to be successful on steemit" and bla bla bla but among the search result was "esteem" which I decided I would install and I did.
When I opened the app, it requested for my steemit authentication details before I could proceed, at this point I knew I had to ask questions and also paused to read the information on the play store. I also asked my guy then @theheralds if it was safe and he told me jokingly that it was steemit official mobile app. With that I moved forward to input my login details and guys, I only use esteem on my mobile since then and I must say, it has been with me for a long time and I can write over 3k words as a review for that awesome app but for my readers sake, I would make my points understood as quick as I can.
Features
The list of cool features esteem spots is almost endless but I will only highlight the ones that made me prefer the app to web version on my PC.
As a minnow (and I still am), I usually vote on any science post that fascinates me and I read a lot of articles then. I voted anyhow I wanted but at a point I noticed that my votes could not add 1 cent (lol) to posts I voted. I went on to ask my guy why this was happening and he told me that using my 100% voting power on every post that a point would reach when I won't be able to vote at all and worst of it, I may not be able to even make a post for a while.
He then introduced me to steemnow.com and we quickly checked my voting power and alas, it was on 30% and I was told my voting power would be restored to 100% in approximately 4days. This made me really unhappy and I asked him if I could adjust my voting power. I was told that at my current steempower (12SP then) that I can't adjust that on the desktop web page. When I installed the esteem app I spent a lot of time in the "settings" section and I played with lots of its cool features. I was really impressed and I introduced my colleagues in the office (@akpos, @akpolopez, @sparklez, @diluk) to the app which they confessed to love very much. I also installed the app for my fiancée @prettyprecy which I got a kiss as a thank you, lol.
Well to cut the long story short, adjusting your voting percentage is just a tab away with the esteem app for both minnows and whales and if you've not tried it I will recommend you download it and visit the settings to uncover many more exciting features.
My friend recently introduced me to ginabot and its fancy notifications. As an adventurous guy I took my time and followed the "easy" procedures and got it running on my discord app but I tell you what, esteem app gives me these notifications that bot sends to my discord app by default and even do it better!
I get notification on my mobile whenever someone resteems my post, upvotes my post, when I get a follow, when I am mentioned in the blog or comment, and do you know the fun part of all these notifications, I can tweak it to my taste. I must say that the programmers and software engineers that designed the app spared nothing in the course of making this amazing app.
When I joined steemit, one of the problems I had was how to add profile picture to my homepage. Not just me many other guys that started steemit with me then had this issue and as the tech guy I was thr first to crack this puzzle and uploaded my profile picture through url on the desktop web page by uploading my image on the "post" interface and copying the address preceding the symbols "![ ] ( )". Many had their own way of doing this but this is my own way and I must say it was not easy figuring it out.
But with the esteem app, changing or adding images was very easy and can be as easy as clicking on the camera symbol on the user blog home page which is a symbol many understands. It also spots beautiful night mode just like the desktop page and most of its features can easily be figured out once you get to play with it.
This is one of the best features of the app and I enjoy using it. Some people use ambiguous usernames on the blockchain and if you did not save these names somewhere (which I am not good at saving names and tags) remembering them will be very difficult. Making a name search, or tag search or post search is very easy with the esteem app as it gives you useful suggestions that you can use to easily pinpoint your desired result.
There was a competition my friend told me about a user celebrating her 3500 followers. When I asked her what the username of the person hosting the contest, she told me she has forgotten and that she made a screenshot of the contest which I asked her to show me the screenshot, she looked for it in her gallery and could not find it. I told her not to worry as I will fish out the post. I went to the search bar in my esteem app and typed "celebrating 3500" before I could type another word I saw the post! I showed her the post and she asked me how did that, well I am addicted to saying the truth.
One thing every user on steemit notices is the ability of the web page to consume lots of data. The guys that designed the platform knew about this and this is also one of the reasons why our browsers performs serious caching once we visit steemit.com. Once a page is cached, further request is not sent to the server as the page is already saved on our PC. As already stated, this is partly to reduce server request which takes more data. Furthermore, we can save data by totally disabling image which in my own experience had come in very handy when I'm low on data subscription.
Esteem app was designed in my own experience to load exactly the request our phone made to the server and performs little or no caching which gives us up to date information which is good for blockchain environment where numbers changes in seconds. Also I noticed that since I use my phone more on steemit, I have cut down on my monthly data subscription almost by half and this was not so when I was constantly using my PC for my every steemit operations.
I use to tell my friend that I would level up this week and whenever I say that, I'd truly level up. This is because with my esteem app, I can see my level in two decimal places. This is not so with the web interface as this number is displayed as just a whole number and it bores people like me. Sometimes when I am really busy, I don't bother checking my post, all I do is open my esteem app and check the menu option, if there was an increase in the decimal points of my level, I can predict the weight of the vote(s) I got.
This is also a feature I really love as with the esteem, you don’t have to worry about your saved passwords. Traditionally, once you log on to a computer, you can access its web browsers and when you visit a page with saved credentials, you can perform any operation even transactions without further inputting passwords again.
This is a serious security issue someone can easily access your PC which I would say that most people, even myself, saved the lengthy steemit hashed passwords to in my browser so I won’t be asked to input them anytime I want to make a post or transactions. With esteem, your passwords are secured with a four digit pin which you can easily type in the app and if it’s correct, accepted without punching the enter key.
The not-so-good
This review and my experiences with the app won't be complete without me adding the hitches I get once in a while when using the app. The app hangs once in a while especially when I open the app, searches and select a user and then try to open the users post immediately. I know this is an easy fix for the programmers though it might be a limitation from my phone's end. Apart from this, I would give the app a 5 star rating, in fact that was my rating on Google's play store.
Conclusion
The esteem app is laden with features which I can't exhaust in just one post but I pointed out features that are of great interest to me. Other features are bound like adding bookmark to your favorite post, scheduling posts, good submit a story tab with advanced options and many more but I seldon use these features. A big thanks to @good-karma and his team for this awesome project which I'll term a success.