With Pixelix we are developing a functional, feature-rich and beautiful mobile client for the fediverse Software Pixelfed.
Pixelix is available for free on Google Play Store, Apple App Store, F-Droid and GitHub Releases.
Pixelix is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0) and the source code is available on GitHub.
We started developing Pixelix in December 2023. The idea originated because of the bad state the original Pixelfed app were in back then. So we decided to develop our own solution. Another reason to start this project was that we already developed small native Android apps using Android Studio in the past and wanted to try something larger for the first time.
Version 1.0 was released three month later on March 15. 2024 in Google Play Store with a price tag of 2€. Back then the App had a different logo. At the beginning we didn't have a clear plan in which Pixelix would go. Especially regarding design. Our first idea was to give the app a playful design with many fun graphics like the logo itself. Turns out the logo was not so well received by the users out of multiple reasons. One being that the logo looks more like a game logo and not for a social media app. And another one being that it was AI generated.
In the first few weeks the app had really few users. It felt like our Mastodon posts were posted into the void without real interactions or too much interest in the app. In order to get get more users onboarded and receive more potential feedback, in April 2024 we made the app available for free on Play Store for a few days.
End of May 2024 Pixelix finally got rid of it's controversal first logo and moved to the current one. We designed the logo ourself. The pixelated letter "P" fits well with the name Pixelix. The new version was also well recieved by the community. Since we wanted to keep the old logo in some way, we added the custom logo feature to the app, which includes multiple logo variants.
While the first app version was pretty barebone. Only a few months after its first release, Pixelix already had features like support for multiple accounts, Pixelfed collections, fediverse software detection and more.
Pixelix was not open source from the beginning. But after we recognised real interest from the community for Pixelix to be open source, we finally made the GitHub repository public in June 2024. After some research we decided that the GPL-3.0 is a good fit for Pixelix and aligns with our values, so that's the license the app is released under.
While we opened the source code, we initially didn't publish an APK for free. This changed a few month later, when we released the APK of version 3.0.0 as GitHub release too (additional to the Play Store release).
While Google provides then number of downloads and other interesting stats about the Play Store release, this is not possible on GitHub. So we kind of lost track of how many people really installed and use our app. To solve this we developed a small website that extracts the download numbers from a GitHub API and displays it together with some other stats. This project is called GitHub Release Stats and it can be used to also track GitHub releases other than Pixelix.
Since Pixelfed is a Fediverse service, we wrote about the project and promoted it on Mastodon. In the beginning from our private Mastodon accounts. At end of january 2025 we created a dedicated Mastodon account for Pixelix in order to separate the posts about Pixelix and our private posts.
On January 14. 2025 the app was also available on F-Droid.
Pixelix was developed exclusively for Android, and we never had any plans to develop an iOS version. But that should change end of January 2025 when Konstantin, a developer at JetBrains contacted us and showed us the technology Compose Multiplatform. Compose Multiplatform is a way to develop apps for multiple platforms from one single codebase. Konstantin offered us that he would migrate our whole project to Compose Multiplatform if we are interested. Of course we couldn't decline that offer, both out of curiosity and simply because of the opportunity to make Pixelix also available for Apple devices. The migration worked really well, and only some weeks later the app was working on iOS too. In order to publish an app on Apple App Store, an Apple Device is required. So we invested almost all the money we earned from selling Pixelix on Google Play Store in a MacBook Air. And in April 2025, Pixelix was finally available on Apple App Store too.
In Spring 2026 we decided to add support for another platform called Vernissage. Vernissage is also a Fediverse photo sharing platform like Pixelfed, but more specialized towards photographers. So we refactored Pixelix to support multiple platforms in a clean way. And with Pixelix update 5.0.0 in July 2026 we added support for Vernissage.
After two and a half years of developing Pixelix and having it as a paid app, we've decided to make Pixelix free for everyone.
