I was looking forward to trying Sync today now that it’s live, but my enthusiasm was immediately dampened after seeing the “Data Safety” section on the Google Play store.

Liftoff has been great, and want to say thanks for making an awesome app. This will continue to be my daily driver.

Edit: for clarity, because the post got way bigger than I expected.

Sync looks like a fantastic app, and the dev/s should charge whatever they feel is fair for their efforts, even if that’s through the usual ads + ad tracking.

My intent was just to post here in /c/Liftoff to thank the Liftoff devs for managing to somehow offer an awesome app without any of that.

  • donut4ever@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13842·
    1 year ago

    You have other free and amazing options that sync has no advantages over. They are all just as good, if not better.

    1. Liftoff
    2. Thunder
    3. Jerboa
    4. Connect
    5. Voyager (my favorite so far)
    6. Infinity for Lemmy. Early development, but still free and no ads

    I don’t get why I would go for sync, get tracked, watch ads or pay a monthly subscription!

    • Stumblinbear@pawb.socialEnglish
      949·
      1 year ago

      Hard disagree. I find Sync the best user experience so far, including the best looking UI hands down

      • pavlov@lemmy.worldEnglish
        483·
        1 year ago

        I’ve been using Voyager until today. It was a fine app, but anyone who thinks it holds a candle to Sync is off their rocker. Sync has more features, runs far more smoothly, and looks a hell of a lot better.

        • Vanon@lemmy.worldEnglish
          212·
          1 year ago

          Exactly. I don’t think many of the people who are claiming Sync is no better than others have actually used and thoroughly explored Sync, even for Reddit.

          The customization options are incredible. Beautiful UI. Backup options. Filters. Settings that are fine tuned, and separate per account. It feels like years of work and polish, compared to weeks or months for others. Others work fine (fan of Liftoff), getting better, but I’m blown away with Dawson and Sync. The “ad outrage” is disappointing and silly to me at this stage (literally day one).

          • Laice@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7·
            1 year ago

            Well the years of work is literally that. Sync for lemmy is based on sync for reddit base. Or so it seems

            • Vanon@lemmy.worldEnglish
              5·
              1 year ago

              Yes, just trying to say the years can actually be felt, and it’s an almost unfair advantage, but fantastic for users. Also yes, it’s indeed a full replica with all the features of Sync for Reddit, incredible for day one. Boost will probably have similar advantages.

      • sverit@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I was in the same boat, but I find Connect pretty similar to Sync’s usability.

    • Holodeck_Moriarty@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      303·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, the free apps have really raised the bar. I think there’s a lot of passion out there for the fediverse and non-corporate social media.

      I haven’t tried Voyager yet, but it sounds like I should give it a shot!

    • OceanSoap@lemmy.mlEnglish
      255·
      1 year ago

      Lol, claiming that Jerboa is just as good if not better than sync is wild!

      • Spaceape@lemmy.nrsk.noEnglish
        43·
        1 year ago

        Isn’t that down to what one individually consider “good”?

        I find notepad-style text editors better word processors than Microsoft’s online Office system. It’s not because notepads are technically better or more visually appealing. It’s because I value not being tracked more.

        • donut4ever@lemmy.worldEnglish
          102·
          1 year ago

          Nope, every person on this planet has to have the same preferences as this person. We all have to like the same thing, ya know.

          • Serenity@lemmy.worldEnglish
            41·
            1 year ago

            Yup! That’s why nobody can like whichever client they prefer. Having different opinions is completely incomprehensible and utterly baffling. Why wouldn’t everyone love the same set of 6 apps?

      • Holodeck_Moriarty@lemm.eeOPEnglish
        23·
        1 year ago

        For one, it handles account switching much more smoothly than most apps I’ve tried.

        While viewing a post, commenting, searching, or posting, you can choose your originating instance from a drop-down. Most other apps have to reload your feed and/or relaunch.

        It’s been really helpful for me whenever an instance is bogged down or acting funny, and I can just hop over without losing my place.

        • jennwiththesea@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Yes, this is really handy every time world gets attacked. I still have my world account set as my main, but it’s super easy to just switch over.

        • sudo@lemmy.todayEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Does Liftoff offer keyword filtering or blocking instances at the account level?

        • Cadenza@lemmy.worldEnglish
          43·
          1 year ago

          Liftoff is great, it’s true. Sadly, it lacks the only feature I’m after : hide read posts on scroll. Saw requests for this not being answered, so I guess it’s not coming.

          Great app I admit, but a hard pass for me because of this.

            • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              I want it to scroll to the comment in the post. I’m always manually trying to find the context of a comment by scrolling and looking.

              I mean when you get a notification about a response and it takes you to the comment. It just shows you the comment. And then you click on Show Context. And here I was hoping it would scroll to the location of the comment in the post.

      • El Barto@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        A better question is, what does Liftoff lack that others don’t?

        I miss being able to hide posts, for example.

        • player2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          31·
          1 year ago

          In Sync settings under View Type, you can enable the option to hide a post from the main feed view. In fact, there’s a lot of additional features that can be enabled and customized, the options menu is enormous and it really can be customized to your personal preferences.

          • maaj@lemmy.worldEnglish
            26·
            1 year ago

            I hear you, but nothing matters after ads, trackers, and money. Which is why I should also say that if you download and use TrackerControl from f-droid, you wont see ads on Sync, which is neat. My heart still lies with liftoff, they added double tap home button to scroll to the top and I about lost my shit in excitement, lol.

    • 💡dim@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      1 year ago

      thing is, with all you list (and sync) the key thing is there is CHOICE

      Nobody is forcing anyone to use Sync. If you don’t like the model it uses, then use something else that better fits what you want. People in this thread are acting like its compulsory to use sync.

      BUT. what sync will do is bring people over from reddit. Sync for Reddit was hugely popular and there are tens of thousands of people that used Sync for years that had not shown any interest in Lemmy. Sync will bring some of those to this community which can only be a benefit to everyone.

      Don’t like it, don’t use it.

      • donut4ever@lemmy.worldEnglish
        28·
        1 year ago

        don’t like it don’t use it

        True, but that doesn’t mean we can’t bitch about it

    • can@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Summit (#1 in my heart), also lemmotif is in early development but has promise.

      • joe@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        Whoa summit is pretty nice. I’ve been using Connect but maybe not anymore.

      • donut4ever@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I thought you could just disable it from the settings? I mean, it is open source, so anyone can just fork it if the dev starts fucking around

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      41·
      1 year ago

      I used Sync for a long time on Reddit, but there didn’t seem to be any free clients (with no ads) there.

      I like “no ads” a lot more than I like “a very slightly better UI”, and the free ones for Lemmy offer enough for what I need. I don’t know what a paid one could offer over that to convince me to buy it.

    • notenoughbutter@lemmy.mlEnglish
      41·
      1 year ago

      ROFLCOPTER

      claiming these are just as good as sync just tells what you expect the apps to do

      but what I’ve seen and (a lot of the other posters) is that sync is a whole lot smoother than all these apps and is the most feature-rich client

      if getting tracked is your main problem in using sync, just use nextdns or pihole to block connections to google servers or pay up (currently only using google, I wish there was some other way)
      I’ve read sync for reddit stopped connections to google after paying up

      • donut4ever@lemmy.worldEnglish
        43·
        1 year ago

        Holy shit! Will everyone stop with the “smoothest” and the “most feature rich”? Have you actually tried other apps? Liftoff, thunder, connect and voyager literally run circles around Sync. It was slow as shit. Come on. It’s just another app. There is absolutely nothing special about it that warrants paying for subscription. And ads and tracking on a platform that has been built on not having neither of those??? You have got to be some special kind of moron to accept this app.

    • monobot@lemmy.mlEnglish
      719·
      1 year ago

      And for me, font is just too smal and hard to setup in Sync. And slow.

      Jerboa wins again.