Friendica's own frontend can be modified extensively with themes built into a node. But there are no full-blown third-party frontends that completely replace Friendica's built-in frontend like Phanpy fully replaces Mastodon's frontend or Mangane fully replaces Pleroma-FE and Akkoma-FE.
Currently, the only platform that gives you a selection of alternative, third-party frontends that fully replace Friendica's frontend is Android because there are quite a few dedicated, native Friendica apps available for Android.
On Windows or Linux, all you can do is install Relatica. But it's an early and not entirely open beta, it's very incomplete and unfinished, and to my understanding, it still lacks important features.
On a Mac or an iPhone, you're completely out of luck. Again, there's only Relatica which is just as unfinished and incomplete as on Android, Windows and Linux. But Relatica for macOS and for iOS is only available via TestFlight which requires an account on GitLab in order to get into contact with the Relatica developers.
Wow, Jupiter, thanks for this extensive and insightful overview of issues to think about when considering #Friendica.
I think @stefanbohacek should be interested in it b/c of his Fedi intro tool jointhefediverse.net.
"Friendica's own frontend can be modified extensively with themes built into a node. But there are no full-blown third-party frontends that completely replace Friendica's built-in frontend like #Phanpy fully replaces...
@HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴 Truth be told, what we could need is a feature comparison between the various mobile apps and Friendica's Web frontend to see what covers what.
I'm not quite sure if any Friendica app actually covers exactly 100% of Friendica's functionality. What they should cover is what's needed for daily driving. But I'm not sure if all of them cover, for example, all features of the built-in file manager and every last one of Friendica's own optional add-ons.
An actually, absoutely fully-featured Friendica app would be voluminous. Not as huge as a (streams) app and not as massive as a Hubzilla app, but big.
In the cases of some features, I'm not even sure how much sense they make in a mobile app. Would a mobile app need all configuration controls for the Web interface? And does it make sense for an iPhone app to brandish the full set of Friendica admin controls if it detects the logged-in account to be an admin account?
Besides, in spite of its old age, Friendica is constantly changing and sometimes introducing new features. Third-party apps will have to keep up with core and add-on development.
And once the now-growing Friendica community has settled in and attracted a few devs, and they discover that Friendica is so modular that it can attach third-party add-ons server-side, and they start developing third-party add-ons, mobile apps won't cover 100% of Friendica anymore anyway.