I did a bit of poking around and learned some nuances:

The main one being Fora (with an a) is different than foro/xenforo. But it's a bit complicated.

Xenforo forum software was/is developed by the two original developers of vbulletin.

While not free it's licenses are fairly inexpensive and you can get selfhosted or cloud versions with varying options. It is fairly well respected and one of the top contenders. {(If not the top)

As of what I can tell from searching today it has not been acquired by vertical scope though that is a constant rumor.

Vertical scope does use a highly modified version of xenforo on their forums. So a lot of people tend to conflate the two together, so most forum admins say the vertical scope modifications make the user experience unrecognizable versus distribution xenforo.

Vertical scope does own and promote Fora (with an a) as a forum reading App. It is widely hated, with good reason.

What about other apps for xenforo? Most folks complain about the current app offering from xenforo as well, though they are supposedly in development of one that is much nicer.

The outline in earlier post of what tapatalk allows you to do efficiently is exactly right. I can see on red post s and go straight to them without having to go through pages of stuff I've already seen. I can Mark her form red. I can easily upload images directly to the forums and attachment. Ads, if present, are very unobtrusive.

Virtually none of the above occurs using a mobile phone on most native forums.

If M4C has apps other than Fora, I'll give them a try. But if it does not accomplish the above points, my participation will dwindle as my time to read m4c on my laptop is 2% of the time I spend compared to tapatalk.

There are forums I used to participate in more than m4c that I rarely go to now because of their miserable web experience on phones and no TaT sppt.

I appreciate the staff / admins sharing what they can and hope there is a path forward for all of us.