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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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LJ, the dev of Sync, makes a living off it. It's not a side project like most Lemmy apps are for their devs. This means that yes, it's monetized, but also, it's one of the most polished and frequently updated apps.
Not trying to be just be contrarian for contrarianism's sake, but it doesn't look like anything special to me. I'm just having a hard time wrapping my ahead around why anyone would pay for it, leaving charging for it / putting ads and tracking in it in the first place aside.
It's quite polished, mainly that. Even for a beta, there's almost no bugs, it respects Android Material You specs including animations, and it's highly customizable, allowing advanced filtering for example. It also adds very nice QoL features like automatically removing AMP links for full links.
Value is subjective, I personally consider it worthy of my money.
For me at least, part of it is a degree of "brand loyalty" because I used Sync for Reddit for a very long time. I paid I think 6$ for the pro version years ago and got absurd value for my money.
Now, the dev makes the move to Lemmy and enables an experience that is both very polished and very familiar. I don't mind paying a (one time) fee to support the dev in that setting.
Re: trackers, my current understanding is that all of that was attached to the ad system, and removing ads functionally removes the tracking. My pihole provides a good measure of cover too.
If someone wants to stick with another one, great, I hope it works well for them. I suspect I'll be happy here.
Not contrarian at all, just different preferences. The simple answer for many people is one of habit. Sync was the only way for many people to access Reddit for a long time (including me) and it just felt like home.
I personally am a big fan of Voyager as well and it's really nice to see the vibrant apps scene on Lemmy.
Im also suspecting ads got turned off for the beta. At the beginning of the day i saw them but now I don't. He said there will be a one time payment option as well.
It was still there as of an hour ago.
All i see are blank "sponsored content" boxes. And i changed nothing and paid for nothing.
Interesting. I saw that as well but I'm running a network adblocker, so I thought that was the reason. Those boxes are still a placeholder for ads though.
Still, I think including ads is actually not a good choice here when most of Lemmy users absolutely hate tracking and data collections. Should've made the app paid-only instead of offering a free version with ads. But that's just my opinion.
That's a pretty reasonable opinion. Old Sync got around it by having 2 versions, a free one with ads and a paid one that didn't include the ad code, but recent Play Store clauses don't allow you to publish 2 versions of the same app anymore.