You don't need to use the official Mastodon apps, they're not the best way to use Mastodon. The official apps only arrived last year, and they were intended as "Fisher Price My First Mastodon" things with a restricted set of features.
Third party apps have been around longer than official ones, and include way more features. You can sign in with the same account on all apps.
On Android try Tusky, Fedilab, Megalodon, Tooot
On iPhone/iPad, try Toot!, Ice Cubes, Ivory, Mona
@feditips Fedilab looks really cool. It's got a great feature set. It's just missing one thing, and I've been waiting for it all year: An update that fixes the known bug where the app only gets new toots when I manually refresh each column individually. That's make or break for me, so I'm just keeping a Chrome tab open instead. I get notifications and everything else works. I'll have to take a look at what else is out there now. It's been a few months.
Maybe Fedilab has some fix in the pipeline? Hi @apps, is this a known bug?
Ah okay, sorry about that. Hopefully gets fixed soon.