As an OG Reddit Sync user of over 10 years, all this arguing really brings a tear to my eye. 🥲

Have been using the Sync reddit app daily for years after paying a couple of quid to remove ads whenever I did that. Felt like a steal then and expensive now so, on balance, I'm comfortable having paid the ad randsome. I feel better knowing it all goes to the developer for his personal efforts.

And it's a very high quality app, to boot. I've been a mobile software engineer for more than a decade and this level of polish doesn't just happen by accident

Same. I'm very grateful for the FOSS options, they're like a public option. They create a baseline that paid apps have to surpass, but there's nothing wrong with devs getting paid for their work and that payment shouldn't have to be at the whims of donations. I view it as more choice and more choice is good. This is a small dev on an open platform that can't lock out FOSS options. It's not a mega corp building a monopoly. Sync is not hurting anyone by being a paid option.

The way i look at is if you give me a good app(sync) with good functionality and a nice ui I don't mind seeing ad's or throwing some money the devs way.

My big issue with the reddit app was there was no equivalent exchange going on i had a shitty app with awful ui that was buggy slow showed me adds and tracked my data I didn't get anything from that so I had to stop.

Paying is fine, it's the SHIT TON OF THIRD PARTY TRACKERS they put in the app that worry me

Maybe the real Reddit was the arguments with friends we made along the way

Many of us left reddit due to which AI UI we prefer. So I can see why this happens now.

The fact we can even pick between multiple UIs is a blessing lol

Agreed.

I use two and it’s okay. I uninstalled Reddit app today and deleted every account. I already had did it on the main start of July but the other accounts had to follow through

I'm not fighting, I just want sync users to shut the fuck up and stop advertising their app at every possible minute, because those of us who aren't using it have already decided it isn't the one for us.

Well put. Also, I hope this whole topic dies soon.

I agree, just wish they would stop mentioning how their app is “just so great and only $20 to get no ads” in every single thread and every other post on every instance

Unless it should? And we shall bully them? They should feel unneeded there?

They put ads and ask for cash while showing other people's free resources they put their mind to create? While no other client do so? And plenty of people\bots enable them? And call that a pointless argument on fediverse? Lmao.

Their spines should be broken asap, and everything around Lemmy should stay free or donation-based. If it is not, next you see are paywalled apps and instances. No one would benefit from a trend of purchaseable clients but these devs, while they don't bring content, or anything to the table. Their app is useless without others' work, and yet they charge you 20-100 bucks for being a middleman between you and it. It's senseless.

Fuck sync devs. Fuck sync shills. Fuck them all.

This to me is the most salient point. I think this initial noise will fade away once the various options are all available.

I'm on both so there's that and I ain't rebuying sync when all he literally did was a copy and paste job.

I'm still waiting for Boost, but Sync is fine for now 🙂

Do you have access to an unreleased build? Still no post submission functionality on mine just yet (commenting from Sync).

I personally stopped browsing Reddit once getting sync. It just FEELS right.

When did Sync launch? I was on the waitlist but just installed, waiting to try it out.

I used Jeroba while I was waiting for sync to come out. Personally it's really no competition, it's great that it is being worked on but Jeroba is significantly worse in every way except for being open source. Hopefully someday it will be great!

Synk is just so polished comparatively everything else feels unfinished

Jerboa feels a lot like Joey

Not quite, but close

It's definitely the most polished, snappiest, cleanest Lemmy app atm and I am loving it

Amazing how good it is considering the amount of back end changes needed.

It was obviously written well with separation of concerns considered so it could be done that way.

Hear hear!

Are there any Lemmy apps that actually let you click and highlight a parent comment and then click on a next button to automatically and instantly scroll to the next apparent level comment? RiF (Reddit is fun) had that feature and I can't believe I'm not seeing it on either connect for Lemmy or that sync app.

Yeah, why are some people saying it's a hundred dollars? I'm still using the free version, but my Google Play page is saying 20 bucks. I don't know where that extra 80 is coming from

AND remove ads

See that's what I find obnoxious. IMO programs should not have advertising because nothing should have advertising. Advertising is capitalist conditioning. It shoves consumerism down our throats. The last thing we need now is more mindless consumption!

I suppose that if you don't have any contempt for or opposition to advertising then there really isn't a reason to complain. But I really wish people would take a stand against advertisement, or more generally capitalism and consumerism. Really, who would choose an application where space is wasted on selling them crap when any other option is available? I think such a choice is influenced by the idea that advertising is an inherent part of life, an idea which needs to be countered whenever it crops up. You should be free to make choices that others find irrational of course, but I still think that we need to step up and counter the logic that advertising is some neutral force.

If the developer wants to monetize the program, he could find some other way to do it, such as luxury features, premium support, or premium feature requests. However, my view is that things that occur primarily to make money should probably not occur at all, and that they only happen because capitalism has been imposed upon us. Said differently: if you don't want to develop an app, then just don't do it. I'm absolutely willing to compensate you for your work, and I know that we all need to make a living (under capitalism!), but if the money is forcing you to do it, then clearly you wouldn't do it in a free environment [1].

But at the end of the day, I cannot stress enough how sick I am of being advertised to. No, I don't want to buy your product. If I want to obtain something, I will go to your website or subscribe to your mailing list, or otherwise proactively indicate my interest. If you want to promote stuff, promote your own stuff or stuff , so ince you think your audience/customers would be interested in, because I've already somehow explicitly indicated that I'm interested in your affairs/wares. So I've made it a goal to expel advertising from all aspects of my life.

[1] Yes, this would imply that the vast majority of workers would drop out of the workforce and go do things that they enjoy. This would be a good thing. We don't need to waste all our time doing "productive" stuff anymore.

FOSS and focus on privacy does that to some people, they feel superior because they worry about those things they see as being beneficial.

I'm sure many of the users from the before time were here specifically to not use a closed source, data gathering platform, so they're a bigger proportion of users than they were on Reddit and they tolerate the most extreme elements of their community that also happen to be the most vocal.

TL;DR: Reddit is for normies and now normies are on a platform where radicals were everywhere and part of the majority before they arrived.

There are many entitled people here. Some of them are from linux community. Anything other than that is bad and 1000 posts related to that. Another is sync and other apps. Especially open source only good, closed source everything bad. My feed was full of that. Even though I am a sync user i feel angry when seeing so many non sense posts supporting and against that. Even some communities not related to these are posting this.

The reason why many people swapped was because Lemmy harbors smarter individuals. I need to feel superior simply because I use Lemmy, Otherwise there's no point.

I don't know about doing good or harm but I've used sync for reddit for years and years. The dev isn't some big corporation and that's generally enough for me. I'll support them as long as their app has the experience that I prefer. I tried a few different apps until sync came out and I really gave them all a fair shot but none of them felt right. The fact that so many users bailed to Lemmy because Reddit broke third party apps and then turned around and got up people's butts for using specific third party apps is kind of hilarious to me. A huge wave of users came here for sync etc and people are trying to push them away or bully them like reddit did? They might not be bullying for the same exact reason but it's got the same vibe imo.

I once did an amazing milkshake

🫂

I've been using it over the last few days and I'm pretty impressed with it so far. Before that I was using connect, then sync but didn't like the ads and insane prices, also tried out a few others but ultimately settled with infinity.

I've been using infinity for reddit ever since sync died and I find infinity for lemmy is quite polished and runs the smoothest out of all the apps I've tried, even smoother then sync for lemmy. The only bug I've ran into is trying to press the profile button on the navigation draw at the bottom crashes the app but it still works from the hamburger menu. I like that I have two of the same apps for both reddit and lemmy that are identical in both looks and usage too.

It is available on F-Droid right now. I'm using and pretend to make a donate to the dev.

Sync for Reddit was one of the more popular Reddit apps on Android. (Maybe even the biggest?) Now that Reddit has stopped being reasonable with their API fees, the developer of Sync has been working on a Lemmy client using the same name. It released a couple days ago.

Most of the other Lemmy clients on Android are free and open source, but Sync is closed source and will be ad supported unless users pay a $20 one-time fee to remove ads or pay for a subscription to get some additional features. Because Sync is closed source, there's no way for users to audit what data the app is collecting or sending out.

Many users are using Sync because it's familiar and has a high degree of polish and functionality thanks to being a fork of a very well established app. Its popularity, along with the issues I mentioned above have got a vocal portion of the user base railing against the app and another vocal portion of the user base defending it.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.syncapps.lemmy_sync

It definitely is, but mostly because it's got 10 years of a head start UX wise since it used to be a reddit app.

Using Jerboa and it's good.

Eventually ❤️

Can't wait for Sync to let me login to my kbin account too! Also, I greatly prefer kbins showing the upvotes and downvotes on posts, wish Lemmy had that...

99% of the sync spam I've seen has been from every community other than the sync community. I saw maybe 3 posts from there saying they liked the app and that's it, and everywhere else I see posts from people having a fit over using or not using 1 out of like, what, 10 available apps? The spam really isn't coming from the sync community specifically to begin with tbh.

Shhhh. I couldn't find an equivalent meme with Android (I didn't even notice TBH), so pretend I hacked an iPhone to run android 😂.

Sh!! 🤫 Meme..

It's kinda great though isn't it? Reminds me of old times. Do you think we'll relive the android vs iOS wars soon? Oh, omg... Have we done the grilled cheese vs melt thing here yet???

Shit! The meme is using the wrong phone! It's meaning is lost!!!

Sync for Lemmy is smooth and responsive. Just like how it was on Reddit. After using Sync, you will be comparing every other app experience against it.

Give it a try. You have nothing to loose.

Sync is closed source, while most of the other apps are open source. So you can't see or modify the code of Sync.

Unlike what some folks have suggested, I don't notice any speed or loading advantages over the other native apps. Some of the other offerings may be a little better but the biggest performance gains when it comes to loading will come from moving off the largest instances to a smaller one.

The main differentiating characteristics IMO are below.

Pros:

• The interface is essentially the one from the Reddit app. It's a mature design in terms of polish and is overall more minimalistic and clean UI. I find it consistent and intuitive to navigate.
• Decent amount of customization. While not exhaustive, the options presented are all well thought out. This includes moving things to side bar, bottom bar, and/or a floating action button.

Caveats:

• Ads by default, with a $20 one-time payment option to remove them. There's also an optional subscription (or a $100 lifetime subscription) for added features, which will include push notifications. Prices may be much higher for some other countries as adjustments for purchasing power haven't been made yet.
• As an early build, some basic functionality hasn't yet been implemented including submitting posts or editing post titles. If you're a moderator, mod functionality and reports haven't been implemented yet.
• Like other apps that were originally for Reddit, there are still some legacy references to subreddits. Sync also seems to still use orange for upvotes and blue for downvotes, which is the opposite from Lemmy.
• It's closed source. Without OAuth, the Lemmy devs have discouraged logging in with closed source apps (although I personally trust ljdawson).
• Some people don't trust Sync having ad tracking built-in. They're disabled if you purchase ad removal. Otherwise, there was only one incident in the past where the app began injecting Amazon referral codes into URLs but this was reversed.

Way better UI and UX, more and better features and customizability. It's closed source though. This may be a deal breaker for some.

For me though, if I have 2 apps of the same quality, I'll obviously choose the open source one, but if one is clearly better than the other, then I'll choose the better app, regardless if it's open source or not.