Friendly Social Browser 17+

As someone with a sensory processing disability and chronic illnesses, I often suffer from extreme light sensitivity. Even with my phone brightness right down, it can still be too bright for me. I can also find using social media stressful and overwhelming but being chronically unwell I rely on it for support a lot. Some social media apps have a ‘night mode’ that makes the background black and the text white, but facebook has yet to add this feature! I was recommended Friendly because it has this feature and wow, what a game changer! My news feed appears in chronological order. I can browse away without blinding myself and scalding my retinas. No more strange and worrying Wish adverts clogging up my feed! No more switching between FB and messenger apps. I’m no longer annoyed by notifications to turn on all the notifications I purposely turned off! All the elements of FB that I find overwhelming and stressful can be removed, it’s amazing! I’ve actually deleted the Facebook and messenger apps from my phone because I don’t really need them anymore. Thank you Friendly!

Cannot recommend this app enough, it’s also worth paying the £1.99 for premium, ad free Facebook is bliss!!!

Recently the iOS FB app started displaying 2 rows of Stories. Stories are Ok, but I don’t want my initial display totally taken over with them. Side note - FB, stop trying to be Tiktok. You’re an old man’s social network. ANYWAY this app lets you revert to a time many years ago when the feed was simple, pure, and had no ads. It’ll also block tracking. Use FB in the old way, and find out if you like it better than the modern iOS app. I’ve kept both, but I suspect I’ll use Friendly a lot. Recommended.

The developer’s “work in progress” workaround solution for the Messenger changes Facebook had to make in Europe is an unwitting improvement over the previous messaging functionality. It enables more features, making it essentially the fully featured desktop version of Messenger. Sure it requires a lot of rotating between portrait and landscape, but I can live with that for the improved functionality. My only reservation about it is that many users will not realise they need to rotate to landscape for some features and back again, so may find it unusable. It needs to be made clear that this needs to be done. Please keep it this way!

Four stars because it’s still not a perfect app, for instance in “night mode” not all options and text are readable, meaning night mode sometimes has to be disabled to read everything. Also Facebook’s new comment thread trees are not supported. Improvement is needed before it can fully replace the official apps. It’s getting there though.