“Hey Google, wipe my ass!”

Eh, there are quite a lot of additional services and products Google is selling. I’d argue they want both: my money and my data. And then they turn my data into more money.

Well, welcome to the club, I guess? Hard to understand how a corporation as big as Google (or Alphabet) has such a hard time catching up to other music/podcast services. I am subscribed to Youtube premium, so I try Youtube music every once in a while and it’s just not as good as Spotify! The playlists Spotify generates are lightyears ahead of anything Yt music has. And the main page of YouTube music is just random stuff that has nothing to do with anything even remotely similar to stuff I listened to. Also, so many artist pages still have no additional information about the artist/band.

Anyway, for podcasts I prefer Pocketcasts. The free version is more than enough for the amount of podcasts I actively listen to.

Eli5, pls!

Mh, I’m fairly certain I had something like that pop up a couple of years ago. A card or some notification or something telling me the air quality. Don’t think I have seen it since. I don’t use discovery on my phone (Pixels since 2018) at all. I only see it when I open Chrome empty.

Totally agree with your sentiment generally but Facebook made boatloads upon boatloads of money.

Doesn’t sound that different from Twitter, tbh.

It’s there but doesn’t work, yet.

I try Sync since it got released, so for the past 48 h, on and off without paying any money. I haven’t had a single ad since then. I don’t use any VPN or ad blocker on my phone. Don’t know why that’s the case. Maybe because I have the appearance set to list?

Anyway, I really like the app! It really feels the most polished app by a mile to me. Yet, Voyager (as of now “only” a web app) feels also pretty polished, it just has a lot less things in the settings I can tweak.

As a former RIF user (and I really never used anything else on my phone for Reddit) it still feels a bit weird to hop apps but at the end of the day that’s the beauty of the Fediverse: there is just so much choice and if you like Sync enough you have plenty of ways to give money to the dev, just as there are ways to donate to devs of the other apps you like!

Sorry for the tangent!

I am in the same boat. Bought RIF years ago and there are a couple of other apps I got as a one time purchase but subscriptions mostly make me delete an app immediately. Stuff like Spotify or Netflix are exceptions of course but those apps are just the gateway to a paid service. Sync doesn’t have to pay money on an ongoing basis to Lemmy. It’s straight up a purchase to the developer for an app.

Not too concerned though, I use Voyager at the moment and it’s just such a great way to browse Lemmy, I have no problem sticking with it!

Aside from the useless features overkill, I still think SwiftKey is the best Android keyboard. I ignore 90% of the stuff they implement. Quite frankly I am almost unable to type quick without it.

Spotify is 10 a month for a normal subscription, so Pocket Casts is roughly a third of that for one year. I don’t like Spotify for podcasts at all but it is a big part of the service nowadays. Still awfully expensive for Pocket Casts when you consider that it is just for podcasts and no music - unlike Spotify.

The “smaller” a series still got headphone jacks.

Edit: I stand corrected. It’s gone, Jim.

I love how pretty much each and every comment section on posts about apps to access the Fediverse will always end up with people declaring their favorite app of the day! I mean this sincerely, because of that I kinda feel connected to most of you! It means we all are in some sort of griefing stage because most of us lost a reddit app we used for years (a decade even in my case. Rip RIF!). It also means most of you are hopeless nerds and I really appreciate that!

Excuse my little tangent!

PS: my favorite way of accessing the Fediverse is currently Wefwef but I still check out every new app I come across.