They’ll release a second one, but never a third. It’s what they do

I think you underestimate how expensive licensing music is. As an example, the vast majority of Spotify’s revenue goes to paying licensing fees and is most of the reason they’re wildly unprofitable

Man you really think I’m being wildly more hostile than I am. It was genuine curiousity. It was in no way unnecessary, it wasn’t attacking you in any way, it was prompting a conversation. If you think every response to you that’s only tangentially related to what you said is off topic, then I fear for anyone who even attempts to have any sort of conversation with you at all. That’s how conversations work.

Fifteen years ago my searches were limited to Minecraft and basic programming questions. Now they’re more like searching for specific research papers and other significantly more complex topics and I get much less useful results. Are they related? Who knows! It’s an interesting idea, though, which I was hoping to explore with someone who might be interested. But no, you decided to be whatever this is.

Fuck, dude, get your head out of your goddamn ass. Learn how to talk to people. Fuck.

I wasn’t trying to “get” anyone. It’s genuine curiosity. Christ, dude. Send your toxic-ass Reddit attitude back to that shitty platform it belongs.

I wonder how much of that is Google being worse and you making more complex searches because you’re older

I can’t wait for yearly Nintendo console releases with merely cosmetic changes at $1500 price points and breaking OS changes that prevent you using games you bought two years prior!

I genuinely don’t see where you’re coming from with that

That’s the sound of someone who realizes they forgot what conversation they were having and refused to admit it. That’s okay, it happens to the best of us

Doesn’t really make a difference. Google pays to keep their search engine the default, same as they do for Apple.

Do you even remember what conversation we were having?

No it’s not. It’s called admarketplace

Uh. Google is an advertising agency. Their entire business model is collecting data. Chrome is made by Google, ergo the ad company that Chrome uses is Google because Chrome is Google.

They collect everything

Nowhere does it say they collect browsing history. There are multiple places across their site where they explicitly say they do not.

… the ad company IS Google

Firefox collects diagnostics and some usage data, not browsing history, Google collects absolutely anything and everything.

Their primary, nor secondary, source of revenue is not selling your data. You can also disable it entirely pretty easily. You cannot do that in Chrome.

Given the two options, one is clearly better.

You said “isn’t any better” than chrome. Given the choice between the two, there is clearly a better option

Would you rather your data be sent to a browser company or the largest advertising agency in the world?

… Tell me again how these are the same?

Because this isn’t a net neutrality issue?

The paid app binary and the non paid binary are exactly the same. You do not download a new apk when you purchase content in an app. Sync’s “online verification” is through Google Play’ libraries. When you purchase, your device received an entitlement to that specific purchase which allows it to re-verify that purchase without hitting Google’s services each time the app is opened. Since it was a lifetime subscription, this entitlement never had to be renewed.

As for it working between phones, either the entitlement is bundled with the app (which I’m not positive of), or it’s entirely possible the version you had was bugged so that it acted as though you had purchased even though you had not in the event these libraries were not available.

Either way makes no difference. You need the entitlement to activate the features, not an entirely new APK, which means he’d have to produce a build either with that entitlement (not possible) or without the purchase verification code (since you don’t have the entitlement).

I am aware that the APK is the same. BUT if he sent you the APK without changes, your purchases would not be activated because you refuse to use Google. In order to restore them, he’d have to manually enable them for you. Use your head.

Just don’t use the app. This isn’t rocket science.

Depends on what you mean by beholden to them. Unless you’re partnering directly with certain ad providers it’s pretty much plug-and-play: you can just choose to not optimize for serving ads.

Your subscription is tied to Google. He would have to tear out the check for a subscription since you refuse to use the typical system.

Hence, he’d have to produce a build specifically for you without that code. This isn’t rocket science.

He would still have to build an APK without ads just for you.

I’m a dev so can shed some light. It’s likely linked to a service called Firebase, which gives many tools to track how people use your app. You can run tests against sections of your user base to determine the best way to apply certain features before rolling them out, as well as crash reporting and the ability to see “user journeys.” These “journeys” are often used to determine how to better structure an app so that users can get to where they want to go more quickly. It’s a way of collecting user feedback without asking for user feedback. It’s incredibly useful for feature development and bug fixing

Now, given they have ads, they’re probably using Google adsense which is likely linked to firebase, so Google may get some information on how people use the app in order to increase revenue per impression. This is largely automatic

Even with ads Sync is a thousand miles ahead of Jerboa in terms of usability and experience. I’ll happily have ads to not have an objectively worse experience

Lemmy choosing not to serve ads doesn’t mean nobody else is allowed to. I have no issues with Sync serving ads at all. Heck, I wouldn’t even care if Lemmy served them. People have a right to be paid a reasonable amount for their effort

To be entirely fair the score isn’t the only determining factor. My credit is around 690 with perfect payment history except for one delinquent student loan account from 6.5 years ago and I still get rejected for things that “should” only require a score of > 640.