I only recently became aware of ecency's desktop web-browser front-end.
As you've pointed out, there are a lot of good features there -- I especially like how they put the text of replies in the notifications sidebar -- you can see what everyone has recently said to you, all at a glance.
I had tried the iPhone version of ecency a couple months ago and had a problem getting it to work on my iPhone, so I initially gave up.
However, I recently had a quick discussion about it with @good-karma on a dev site, and he had the bug fixed and a new version uploaded to the App Store in less than a week.