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/
As the other comments are saying, this is made very clear when you launch the app for the first time that it is ad supported, and you can donate a small amount to get all tracking and ads removed.
Love the app and I want the dev to continue development so I paid for the ad free. Devs are people and need money to live too, you know this post was just sensationalized for your own clicks.
Lemmings have a huge obsession with shit being both free and adfree, youtube is the most baffling one, they refuse to pay for it, then bitch about the ads, it seems they are entitled to having VoD delivered to them anytime anywhere in the world got completely free.
YouTube is a little bit different, imo. Ads essentially carpet-bomb you on YouTube, and the money isn’t going to the people who actually create the content. If there were a reasonable number of ads, and they paid creators more, I wouldn’t have nearly as much of a problem with it as I do.
Do you think all those bytes of video data are free to host and get to you?
Did you miss the part where I said “reasonable” and “more”? I did not say that there should be no ads or that they should pay creators everything.
YouTube makes more than $350b annually, and the most liberal operating cost estimate I’ve seen (they don’t release numbers) has put their hosting and distribution costs at about $25b. They pay out $9b annually to creators. They have 122k employees making an average of $117k annually, so that’s another $13b in employee salaries (which is always the biggest cost any company shoulders). To be extremely generous, let’s assume they also spend another $40b for all the other stuff they do as a business (office space, gold for play button plaques, pizza parties for their employees, legal, etc)–to be clear, that’s more than Netflix made in total last year, so while it might be ridiculously high, it’s not ridiculously low.
That adds up to $87b in operating costs annually. To be even more unreasonably liberal here, let’s double that. $174b in operating costs on $350b revenue would be less than half of the total, leaving them them with a whopping $176,000,000,000 in profits annually.
Only about $40b of that is ads; everything else is from subscriptions, deals, etc. And, as noted before, they pay creators about $9b annually. So if they cut ads in half, and doubled their creator payout, they would reduce their total profits to $147b. If they totally eliminated ads altogether and quadrupled their creator payout, they’d still be making more than $107 billion dollars per year above operating expenses.
They can afford to ease up on the gas a little bit.
Definitely a dissenting view but one I can’t help but agree with. Same applies to piracy for me. You don’t want to give Disney money? Fair enough. Very reasonable. You still “need” to watch The Mandalorian? Okay…
I don’t think that’s how most pirates, myself included, see it. It’s not about “needing” to see the mandalorian, it’s simply about wanting to see it, but if the only way to see it “legally” is to make a monthly subscription for a service that offers me no other value, offered by a company I don’t want to support, I’m not doing that. And the thing is that it doesn’t have to be this way - I happily paid for Netflix for years, before content started being fragmented. As a wise man once put it, piracy is a service problem, not a price problem.
Same with Youtube - it’s not the ads, it’s the endless amount, the annoying implementations, and non-creator-friendly practices. They’re not doing ads in order to keep the servers running - they simply need to find new ways to squeeze every cent of profit quarter after quarter, and I’m not playing that game.
This only applies to big corps though - if you pirate indie content and don’t even make a donation to the artist, you’re an ass.
I really appreciate you responding to me in good faith, thanks. I know it’s a fine line, but generally for me not liking the terms of the agreement isn’t enough for me to force my own terms. That said, the one time I’ve pirated something in the last few years was when Prime removed a show from the platform when I had 1.5 episodes of 5 seasons left to go. The idea of paying an extra 10 quid to watch maybe 1% of an otherwise ‘free’ show pissed me off haha.
So I’m not following my philosophy perfectly either. If it came to something like wanting to watch The Mandalorian from scratch though, I would wait and buy the DVD/BluRay.
I disagree with that, Piracy doesn’t cost anyone anything, it’s people using their own internet connection and hardware to share the data, I also paid way more for my Plex setup than what it would cost to pay for streaming services.
I have everything in one place, conveniently, that’s the big difference, that’s why I am willing to pay more for my own setup.
I used to pay for netflix too, but then everyone started doing their own streaming service and now you need to have like 5-6 and then every country has something different on it, it’s a mess.
Not to mention they did shit like removed a Community episode because I guess that fixed racism?
another thing is that Scrubs is one of my favorite shows, but because licensing deals expired they changed the soundtrack and the original soundtrack was a huge part of that show, so to see it in it’s original version, you have to pirate it.
Ya… I just bought the app. It was like 6 bucks? Totally worth it since I use it all the time and I want to support the dev.
I reported this post because it hurts the dev for no reason. Hope it gets removed but the damage is already done. People are stupid.
If the devs say it up front then how does reporting it hurt them? It’s just accurate.
It’s being presented in such a way that makes it look like malicious/nefarious tracking is in place, when in reality it has to do with ad analytics.
It’s 2025, ad analytics ARE for malicious/nefarious purposes. Who do you think they’re selling them to, Mr. Rogers?
And if you want them gone, you can pay for the app. It’s not like you’re stuck with them.
Don’t abuse the report system.
Your getting downvoted for an accurate statement.
This really is just redditv2. Discussion to the sidelines over vibes and feels.
Same deal with sync.
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, you suck. This has been (falsely) reported before, and every time it gets shut down as fear-mongering. I really doubt you learned of this, did any kind of source checking or just looked it up without seeing the MANY disproving replies that are always there.
I’ve seen this enough times, this exact post, to where I’m certain it’s consciously done false sensationalist crap. There are several other posts like this about other apps and services that get posted every couple of weeks/months and just like here they always get told off for their idiocy. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a group or person doing much of it, it’s the exact same every time.
What’s the explanation? AWS sounds like ad trackage.
Removed by mod
I’ve seen this kind of post about boost several times now. It’s just sad that people are just maliciously uninformed. It made me want to support the dev even more. Paying for the ad free version now.
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.
Voyager is the best Lemmy client on iOS or Android both, with Jerboa being a close second.
You will only pry Boost from my phone over my cold dead hands.
I recommend Thunder. Always been slick and good.
I tried the others and stuck to it. But I think all the apps are great and it just comes down to personal preference on which someone likes to drive most.
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.
Would like to throw thunder_app@lemmy.world in the ring as an alternative
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.
This reads like a paid advertisement.
Or you can buy Boost and get rid of the ad/tracking.
Boost is brilliant and other apps still have catching up to do but the competition is getting better and better.
I’ve used boost for forever in reddit, I used it when it came to lemmy.
But voyager is better.
Will give it a shot, thanks! Though I’m very happy with boost currently - what does voyager do better?
Yes give it a try.
I’m not saying that boost lacks anything. But it’s the feel that I get when using Voyager. I know it’s weird, but, it’s my enjoyment that made me switch.
I guess I’m just legitimately confused about how to feel about it all. Lemmy is free, signing up on an instance is free, people are posting/creating content for free, moderators are taking care of the space for free. No one’s locking in to get “fed” through the entire chain. The arguments about abandoned apps doesn’t really compute since plenty paid and advertising friendly apps go under/stop developing further as well (and the entire Lemmy eco-system is free so silly points of “capitalism better”). There’s also the crux of “Apps just replace a webpage”, they’re really not reinventing the wheel here.
But, if people prefer paid apps, if the developers want to construct the apps in that manner, have at it. I do think spreading awareness of what apps are out there is important, and how they operate (this is YSK after all). I also wouldn’t spend time in my day coming into defend organizations that want to monetize on open source community projects either.
I just wanna use one that has material design/material you, so it looks good in my Android phone
Voyager has two themes: one uses Material design for Android users and one uses the old Apollo look-and-feel for iOS users.
