I can change it to to reddit instead of old.reddit it seems either way it links to the exact same page. I can see how that could be confusing to a novice user.

As for u/u_<user> in the link, I do filter those out so it will not show those in the results.

/c/ and /u/ were intentionally left unsupported due to this being a remnant prior to the new linking format of @<user>@<insatanc.xyz> and !<community>@<instance.xyz>. I can add support for these links though. I think for forward compatibility, I’ll have it automatically convert these links to the new format if one is typed.

Yes I am the developer of Arctic, thank you for taking the time to write out your thoughts. I’ll do my best to respond to all your feedback here.

1. Swipe Gesture: when I mentioned a new feature to disable swipe gestures I was only referring to swipe actions on cells, eg. (upvote, downvote, reply, share, etc) swipe navigation is still enabled when disabling swipe actions. However with swipe actions enabled, you can still use swipe gestures to navigate the app, you just have to start your swipe at the edge of the screen just like navigation in the Mail app for instance. With that said, based on this feedback I added a new setting to enable full-screen navigation gestures, with this you can swipe left or right to go forward or back from anywhere on the screen. This is not a default iOS navigation gesture which is why I did not opt to include this from the start.
2. Tap Gestures: This one I am unsure about, double tap to upvote makes sense, however Long Press, and Haptic Touch are the same thing on most devices now that Force Touch was removed from new devices, and there would be no good way to handle both on the same view. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by triggering something random every time? Do you mean swipe gestures are random?
3. Post Footers: currently the information on the bottom left of the posts is just statistics label, its meant as an overview of the post contents, not as an interactive element, that is why the label is small, since interaction is not intended. As for the vote buttons to the right, I could definitely make the configurable like the swipe actions so you could configure their actions. I’d prefer not to use the left information label as buttons, but I can look into adding more customization to this footer view as a whole.
4. The ••• menu: This is something I may be able to improve. I’ve opted to show repeated options like voting so the menu is consistent throughout the app. Users can change the swipe actions, and disable vote buttons, etc. so this menu may be the only place with those options left available, and I wanted that to be consistent in post feeds, open posts, comments, etc.
5. Comment Threads: This is something that definitely has room for improvement. I am working on adding profile pictures which should help improve following conversations. I do not want to differentiate between comments, replies, subreplies, etc. These are all just comments whether it is a reply to the post or a parent comment. I do plan to add support for continuous lines to the left to make it easier to follow comment depth, However the current layout is basically the standard as far as comment feeds are handled in most other apps I’ve used with comment chains.
6. Comment Profile Pictures: I mentioned this above, but this is something I am working on adding, I’ll hopefully have this included in the next update.
7. Creating and Managing Communities: This is a feature already, Though I may need to improve its visibility. For editing a community you moderate, you can open the ••• menu at the top of the screen when viewing a community feed and select Edit Community. Here you can edit the community metadata and settings. For managing user reports, you can open the same menu and open the Mod Zone (only available if you moderate at least one community) which is available in the profile tab, or the subscriptions list view. For creating communities, currently this is only available in the profile tab under the ••• menu, but I will also be adding this to the subscriptions feed for better visibility.
8. Default Tint Color: This one is something that won’t be changing. Arctic is modeled to behave and appear like a system app on iOS, most system apps use a default tint color of blue. Additionally, Arctic’s logo is primarily blue and this fits with Arctic’s branding. Blue is also a calming color with great contrast and legibility with both light and dark backgrounds. In designing Arctic, my primary influences were Apollo, and the system Mail app, both of which use the default system blue for the tint color. However, if you do not care for the default tint, you can always change it in Arctic’s Appearance settings. I am also in the process of adding full theming support for Arctic so you can customize the color scheme of basically every element in the app, and save multiple themes.

All of this is open to discussion, I’m always happy to add new features and improve Arctic. On that note, I did finish up the Reddit Migrator yesterday. The new migrator works almost exactly the same as the migrator in Voyager, It was done very well there and I did not see much room for improvement.

Thank you for all the feedback, it is always welcome!

[edit] I just finished number 6, comments will now display user avatar pictures. Users can enable or disable this feature in settings

I keep forgetting to enable clearing notifications when reading them in app. I added this feature, but had it disabled for testing. Thank you for reminding me.

As for real-time notification, this is just not possible yet due to API limitations. If they add support for web hooks in the future, then I will add real-time notifications. But currently the only way to get notifications is to request them from the instance. Im already fetching notifications once a minute for each account with notifications enabled. This translates to a lot of network traffic for instances, and I do not want to increase that beyond what it is currently.