I loved Sync for Reddit, but let's not get too carried away. You can't submit posts yet.
Its nice but its an ad supported experience, I'd rather just pay for the app than pay a monthly/yearly subscription. Good new option, just not one I'll be using specifically.
The subscription model is not a great idea considering lemmy is not as popular as reddit.
I don't agree with the premise that you can only charge for one or the other though. The Sync dev has a track record of putting out a very performant app for close to a decade. A one time ad removal fee and an optional subscription is pretty reasonable IMO.
I get the philosophical problems you have with it though. In the end I'm still using it because I paid like $5 none years ago and got way more than my money's worth with it on Reddit. The ad unlock is more expensive here, but it's probably an early adopter tax with the user base here being a tiny fraction of Reddit.
As for Apollo, I'm not sure how many Apple users pay for apps but if I had to guess they probably outnumber android users easily.
It also feels dirty to use an app only available in the Apple ecosystem as a paragon of open source ideals. That's a pretty adaptive Stallman meter.
It seems we have some fundamental differences in opinion here. I don't think it's pissing in anybody's face for a full time dev to make money off a free offering of their product. The app has never had ads for me since I block them at the DNS level. I still paid for it to support an app that's going to dominate my screen on time just like it did on Reddit.
Like you said, the rest of the apps don't currently have ads. A lot of their devs also said they'd never have them. That's great for them. I don't how many of them do this at a full time job either. Or how long they'll continue to support their apps under their current models (aside from Jerboa which is developed by one of the Lemmy devs)
It would be great if Sync could rely only on donos, but the amount of people bitching about a one time $20 purchase being too expensive or expecting to transfer their $1 purchase of Sync for Reddit 9 years ago to Lemmy has me thinking that's just a pipe dream.
If it's not worth it to you go ahead and use a different app. It's still not pissing in anybody's face no matter how much you don't like it.
If instead you had to just pay for the app up front with no option for a free ad-supported tier, would that be okay? I don't see how there'd be any difference. Or do you just expect these devs to work for free?
Just a heads up, Sync's just been updated with a one-time payment for permanently removing ads. The Sync dev is just one guy working on it full time, so I think the pricing ($20/€20) is fair.
iOS users are more likely to pay for apps. ad-supported is common. Of course you could so both.
I received the alert it was available and downloaded it right away, so happy to be back on Sync!
Fantastic. No bugs for me so far but it's only been a few minutes (and I'm not using lemmy.world). I'm excited lol, feels so great to be back
I had to hit cancel and install again and then it went immediately. Not sure why it got stuck in pending mode. It feels good to have sync back!
You're the kind of person who will never donate money to your favorite instance or to Lemmy development.
Cry me a river. Why should i have to use proprietary app with ads and in app p... If there is open source apps that give you all of that without all the bull.. and tracking?
For someone who has a choice you are super pissed off.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with what you want no more than there's anything wrong with people who like a particular app author and want to support him.
