According to the tracking scanner Exodus (can be found on F-Droid), which keeps an updated database on trackers and runs your installed app against its register, you can track what apps are tracking you and clues of how. Saw that Boost is tracking me and uninstalled it and went straight to Jerboa. Jerboa is pretty similar to good ole’ RedditIsFun-app and easy to use, so I am personally recommending it.
From F-Droid:
Exodus (Exodus show you trackers and permissions in apps installed on your device.) https://f-droid.org/packages/org.eu.exodus_privacy.exodusprivacy/
YSK that, in general, you should only ever use Android apps from F-Droid unless you’ve got a very good justification for doing otherwise. That’s especially true for generic/basic utility apps like calculators, calendars, and file managers, classic games like solitaire or tetris, and Lemmy clients.
This is completely natural common sense for you and me, but to other people its alien to live with the “guilty until proven innocent” mindset that needs to be applied to software.
Weird question maybe but are any of the podcast apps as feature rich and pocketcasts? I really like the trim silence function.
AntennaPod is like 10x better than pocketcasts. Anytime someone asks for a podcast app, Foss or not, Antennapod is the first one brought up.
Lemmy looks and works fine in a mobile browser; why do you even need an app?
Gestures, user tagging, UI improvements.
On mobile web on the default Lemmy UI, you need to scroll to the top to get to other communities and change the sorting of posts and comments, where it’s way more accessible on apps.
Voyager is pretty good but mr. Voyager developer, for the love of god, add some left-right margin! I don’t know why but this makes me irrationally angry to the point I simply can’t use Voyager
Nice example! 😜
As long as it’s toggleable, cause I like the no margin
Excessive configuration can be a problem of its own (can lead to decision fatigue, for example). I think it’s okay for the Voyager dev not to try to please everybody all the time, and for people who really want margins to use a different app.
Nooo, I hate useless margins (especially on the narrow side of the screen)! :D
You will only pry Boost from my phone over my cold dead hands.
I use Sync. Does it track my data too?
Judging by the fact that the dev hasn’t bothered to do anything with it in months, I doubt that it matters.
I’m not familiar with this interface, but it looks to me like it is saying Google was doing the tracking. Could this be tracking attempts made from a web view opened while using Sync, and not the actual Sync app itself? I want so badly to believe they are more privacy conscious than that. Love the app, been using it since it first came out for Reddit. Solo dev IIRC.
I am not either lol, and the web browser tracking you suggest is a decent possibility.
For what I can see, no. At least, not more than normal apps. A lot of apps comes up with the blocking tracking attempts (duckduckgo) by the company Google. Google is the only one with sync.
Edit: I have paid for the app.
This reads like a paid advertisement.
Good work bringing this to the attention of others.
I agree that Jerboa is good. If anyone wants another option, then Connect For Lemmy is clean, simple, and updated frequently. I’m nothing to do with Connect, just someone that has tried loads of Lemmy apps on Android, and has settled on Connect.
Sync is also pretty good
It has the same trackers problem as Boost.
Connect dev here. In addition to no trackers we also have no ad SDKs, or analytics of any kind. Cheers!
Kuro and Connect are both 10/10
Isn’t it possible to provide an ad supported version without tracking?
How would that work? You want the Boost dev to create their own “ethical ads” network?
Yeah someone would need to create an ad network according to what Mozilla is envisioning, then Boost would have to utilize that and add support for it. There’s an extra step involved. 😅
Well – two extra steps. The first one is huge, which is to create an ad network devoid of the tracking that companies salivate for, then there is Boost adopting it. The latter seems highly likely and a small change. The former is huge and feels unlikely in today’s world.
Ads generally come with tracking, since the advertiser wants to know their ad was seen / effective. Some ad systems might be better than others, but I don’t have experience there
I know Mozilla is working on ‘Privacy respecting ads’, which was also controversial: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/article/a-privacy-first-solution-that-meets-advertisers-needs/
An up front paid app for devs trying to make money off of the lemmyverse? Sure, okay. A free version by devs trying to make the world a better place? You’re a literal hero. Devs doing shady tracking like this? Never ever.
But they’re not? The first time you install/open the app it tells you that to be able to serve ads it has to track you to some extent. And if you get the paid version it doesn’t even load the apk for the ads
to be able to serve ads it has to track you to some extent
Yeah but this is just a lie, they just choose advertising providers that work like that
i so want to downvote you
It’s an imperfect world and I don’t blame you.
Thanks. Just uninstalled it.
good now delete every other app on your phone that contains Google ads
Difficult for Android users.
that’s the point
Big 'yet you live in society. Curious" vibes.
i just thought it’s a bit useless to delete an app “because it has Google trackers” and then keep using 23 other apps that have Google trackers
But that’s one less app and there are great alternatives, so why continue using one that tracks you?
I have bought the premium version because it was really cheap so no it doesn’t track me
You do you, most goes with what’s free and there are plenty of good free options available.
Ads are a bad way of funding the development, especially for Lemmy, a place where a lot of people are increasingly privacy-minded.
sure, hope you enjoy your free apps while they last
Ads are a bad way of funding the development, especially for Lemmy
couldn’t agree more! that’s why I bought the premium version
Use this app to make sure. It installs a local VPN to check connections, needs no root.
Because it doesn’t?
It does. Check the official privacy policy, 9 mentions of trackers as well as the extremely limited options for opting out of the trackers.
ive been on Voyager and i like it very much. is there a known better option, or my first choice was a solid? thanks
No, Voyager is a very solid choice, and def the best option available ATM
Thank you O/
is there any way to get display names/pfps/etc on Voyager? I keep trying to switch away to an app that has those features but something about Voyagers simplicity just keeps me hooked.
no, because the dev thinks display names are actively harmful and should be removed from lemmy. they support replacing display names with flairs like reddit. I think their post is thoughtful, but I don’t agree that display names are all that malicious.
that’s really insightful, I agree with your view. Thanks for sharing!
It’s a solid option, here is a list of great fediverse clients I made on AlternativeTo if you want to discover other great options.
Thank you! Saved and noticed you mention Openvibe on the list. It’s a real great app. Some of the others I’m gonna give a try
I personnaly don’t use OpenVibe as I tend to avoid proprietary software on personnal device but I like the idea of having multiple protocoles or services in one feed.
I think nostr has some amazing feature and it’s something really interesting to see evolving but the fediverse has a much bigger and diverse user-base which is important to me. Ditto is making the two bridgeable so I think it’s a bright future for distributed social networks (not social media :D)
I always come back to voyager
There is a reason so many Lemmy apps are abandoned, they were free and free of advertising. Devs need to eat. I prefer the paid app model to support the devs as opposed to ads. The dev of boost has always been open about how ads work.
YSK also that the paid version does not have ads or trackers
How do you know if you paid for the app? Can’t find that section in my profile and I don’t remember if I did.
Well simple, have you seen ads?
And, importantly, If your account is paid it never even loads the libraries or initializes the ad systems so there is zero data going to these trackers.
I don’t use this app (I use Eternity), but there’s nothing shady going on here. Developing an app isn’t free and it isn’t unfair for the developer to want to earn a living.
Or just use a browser, ffs.
everything doesnt need to be an app.
especially when its nothing but a goddamn webbrowser, wrapped in an app, with less protection.
Why use a browser?
Just learn how to parse raw HTTP responses. That’s all a browser does, with less protection.
Nope, you can’t actually do that anymore since there’s SSL in the way. I tried anyway, though, just for giggles:
drath@machine:~$ telnet lemm.ee 80 Trying 2606:4700:20::681a:5f3... Connected to lemm.ee. Escape character is '^]'. GET / <html> <head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head> <body> <center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center> <hr><center>cloudflare</center> </body> </html> Connection closed by foreign host.Of course I can curl and wget, but that feels against the spirit of hardcore reading the raw data.
They’re not just browsers, they’re accessing the posts via an API and presenting it in a bespoke manner with purpose-built controls.
That’s good because it’s faster and lower-data than a webpage, and it’s easier and faster to use on mobile.
Not every app is just a web browser, that’s a particular kind of lazy app created by the app hype bubble like 20 years ago.
I really don’t know anything about the technicalities of apps, but you should try http://phtn.app/ on mobile, it’s UI is pretty good.
That being said if there was an app for it I would totally prefer that over a webpage in my browserThat’s very laggy for me, whereas my lemmy app, voyager, is extremely smooth.
It’s building a general purpose UI as a webpage which then has to be interpreted via your browser which then serves the UI up to you. Because this browser has to handle literally whatever is being thrown at it at all times, there is a lot of overhead and extra processes running to make it work correctly.
All of the graphics are equivalent, every line between every element, every button, every image is represented in the same data that the text is, so the phone is interpreting and rendering many times more stuff.
In contrast, a native app takes the bare text & media data and renders it in native controls, so the phone is able take a tiny amount of data and fit it into a template that renders natively on the phone. It’s doing orders of magnitude less work.
I use it on desktop, despite some bugs from time to time I really enjoy the experience and slick design ! It’s still in early alpha so honestly I am impressed !
Yeah there is a dialogue on first launch telling you it’s ad supported software and that you can pay a small fee to remove all ads. Your post here is old news about an old strategy and throughout the comments here you claim it’s secretive which is false.
It’s a charitable reading to say you’re uninformed. I would lean more toward you wanting people to be misinformed about Boost, because as others point out, its ad support is called out in multiple ways before you use it, but you don’t care. Instead, you choose to call this completely common and standard way of supporting an app “predatory” and “secret”, neither of which near truth. Op, is your account the alt of the Sync dev or something?
Op, is your account the alt of the Sync dev or something?
I wish that was the case. @ljdawson@lemmy.world - the Sync dev - has been MIA for over half a year now. Which sucks, because Sync currently has a breaking bug causing it to not show posts as read, making it mostly unusable. I had to cancel my subscription for it that I was happily paying for before to support his work.
wow… subscription and also MIA that long!
It was pretty common for him to disappear for a while and then pop up with a whole bunch of new features. I didn’t mind that before and gladly paid the $1.50/month subscription to support his work and make Lemmy more accessible. But yeah, can’t justify it now that the app shows all links as unread.
Yeah, I remember seeing complaints about that from time to time. Sounds like it’s gotten worse.
It does? I’ve never had this issue on Sync.
It happens when your home instance upgrades to a newer version of Lemmy that changed how one of the variables worked to track read posts. I’m guessing lemme.ee hasn’t upgraded yet? Sh.itjust.works upgraded something like 6 months ago and it’s been unusable ever since. I suppose I could make an account on another instance, but that’s a pain.
You were happily paying it before then? He’s done this so many times. I gave up about a year ago when he made markdown work in titles, which no one asked for, and then disappeared again. Everyone who started a title with a hashtag had a giant freaking heading font for a title.
And spoiler markdown has never worked right. It always used the reddit style. It would even change proper Lemmy spoiler tags into reddit ones when you editted your comment, ruining the spoiler for tag for literally every non-Sync user. That made me so fucking mad!
I took the time to try out every other app at the time and settled on Thunder. It’s just as good, it’s in active development, and it’s free and open source, so it can never be abandoned like Sync is. Anyone can fork it if they had to, and keep it going.
It pisses me off so much that Lawson had the audacity to charge $20 for a broken port of Sync for Reddit and then disappear with severe open bugs for months at a time. I wish I could get my money back. What’s fucking scam. I can’t believe anyone still uses that app.
I downloaded Sync the first day he released it. It had a few bugs, but he was very active at the time and seemed to clean them up quickly. I made a post in his community about a problem with comment sorting and he resolved it the very next day!
So yeah, I glady paid for what I thought was a pretty good app (still is without the unread issue). Since then I’ve gone back to Voyager, which is ok but still has some quirks that make me miss Sync. Might give Thunder a shot.
Jerboa is better apps
