After a 6 year slumber,
Forum Fiend is finally back, and has been updated to
v1.4.0 and should be hitting all Android and Kindle Fire devices shortly! Huzzah!
Many Ape Apps users have only been around since the My Colony days and may not be aware of Forum Fiend, but it was once one of my top apps by far. Created all the way back in 2013 and born out of my even older Discussions mobile forum software, Forum Fiend utilized the (then) open-source Tapatalk API to allow users to browse their favorite online forum sites and communities on their phones, without having to go through the heavy nickel-and-dime official Tapatalk app itself.
Users loved Forum Fiend because it offered all of the features of Tapatalk without the big overhead and with a cleaner and easier to use interface. Of course, Tapatalk hated the competition so much that in early 2015 they close-sourced their API and had their lawyer send me a cease and desist order. So that was pretty much the end of Forum Fiend.
One feature Forum Fiend had that Tapatalk didn't was an optional WebView interface that allowed users to add non-Tapatalk supporting forums to the app as well, so they could keep absolutely everything in one place. This new release is featured around that WebView interface, and greatly expands it with new features that site owners can take advantage of if they choose to do so. Development information for site owners can be found on
this thread.
The new Forum Fiend also contains special code for Ape Apps forum sites (specifically, the website you are looking at right now), making it a great way to view this website on your mobile device.
With many online forums now employing responsive designs, use of the Tapatalk API in 2021 no longer seems necessary. Still, Forum Fiend offers a great way for users to combine all of their forum websites into one place, and for forum owners to add some extra customization features to their sites.
#forumfiend