The developer who made Chirp, the popular Twitter app that was made available for your Apple Watch, has now brought out a similar app for Mastodon.
Stomp is made by developer Will Bishop; you need only sign in to your Mastodon account on your iPhone and you’re ready to go on your Watch. You can view toots, which are the Mastodon equivalent of tweets, alongside checking notifications about new followers or people favoriting your posts.
But if you decide to sign up to Stomp Pro for a one-off fee, or a $0.99 / £0.99 monthly or $9.99 / £9.99 yearly subscription, you can create a toot, reply to others, send messages, search, and more.
It’s also one of the few apps that take advantage of the cellular connections on some Apple Watches - so you can scroll through those toots without having your iPhone nearby. But while this all sounds good, how does it really work in the real world?
A foot in the Mastodon door
In our testing with Stomp, it essentially does what it says on the tin, and it does it well. Scrolling through toots with the Digital Crown is simple but works, and clicking on external links and photos within toots show as expected.
For a 1.0 release, it’s already fully featured and it really does bring the full Mastodon experience to your wrist, just like Chirp has in recent years.
Stomp can be a great way of quickly checking your timeline during a commute to work without reaching for your iPhone, and if you do sign up for a subscription, you’ll be able to reply to someone as you wait for the bus.
Bishop’s app is yet another example of how well a platform like Mastodon can thrive in this post-Twitter world that we’re clearly living in. Take Ivory on iOS by Tapbots for instance: The app developer also pivoted to Mastodon after its app, Tweetbot, closed down due to Twitter ending third-party support. Now it’s thriving, and many users on Mastodon consider this app to be the best client to use on iPhone and iPad.
Now though, there’s a reason to use Mastodon on your Apple Watch when you can’t use Ivory. Stomp brings a straightforward feel to your wrist without overloading you with new features and gives you a great way to quickly check your toot timeline at a glance. So if you were thinking of signing up, give it a try and install Stomp to see how it could replace that bird-shaped hole in your life.
