Please give Sync a bad rating on the Play Store

a year ago by FooBarrington to c/syncforlemmy

Let's face it: the app has been abandoned for longer than is acceptable, especially at this price level. It's no longer working correctly on newer Lemmy versions, and there's no indication the dev is still active.

Yes, he worked similarly during Reddit times, but a) Sync was much cheaper back then, and b) Reddit didn't change as much.

Right now, to unsuspecting users Sync seems great given the 4.9 star rating on the Play Store. They'll possibly buy this app before noticing that it's subtly broken.

Please consider giving Sync a bad rating, but if you do so, explain why. Write about the broken functionality, so others don't fall into the same trap.

NaibofTabr 43 points a year ago

FOSS options available via F-Droid:

And via the IzzyOnDroid repository:

Thunder
Interstellar (also handles Mbin)

Go FOSS, avoid the Play store, be free.

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drasglaf 14 points a year ago

I've been using Voyager for nearly a year and have no complaints.

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bert 7 points a year ago

Same here, though I do have one thing I miss from Sync: press+hold on an image in feed to make it full screen. Happen to know if there is a voyager setting to enable this functionality?

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curbstickle 4 points a year ago

I don't believe I've set anything specifically for it, but a single tap on an image goes full screen.

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bert 2 points a year ago

Hmm, maybe I need to take another look through my settings (or perhaps I didn't clearly enunciate my issue), because when I click a thumbnail in my main feed it opens the link, rather than a larger version of the image.

I miss Sync for that singular feature of press+holehold on a thumbnail in the feed to show a full size image of said thumbnail.

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KazuyaDarklight 10 points a year ago

Right now I feel like Connect is giving me the most Sync like experience.

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rikudou 2 points a year ago

Try Eternity, it's good.

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mintiefresh 1 point a year ago

It's decent. My next favorite after Sync. However the upvote score isn't showing properly for me. It's the wrong count and goes downwards after I upvote. And if I do it again it gives a different number.

Unfortunately the dev on there is really inactive too. Although they've stated recently that they're going to start working on it again.

Sigh. It's too bad. I understand this isn't their main thing so I don't want to say too much.

Nice app aside from that though.

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rikudou 1 point a year ago

Yeah, the really slow updates and unfinished stuff sucks, but from the 6 or so apps I've tried, it was still the best.

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Melonpoly 8 points a year ago

Racoon is dead and Eternity hasn't been updated in a while.

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hmmm 4 points a year ago

Racoon

No, it's not someone forked it.

Eternity

Will get update in future.

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Melonpoly 1 point a year ago

Ooh, do you have a link to the racoon fork?

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hmmm 2 points a year ago

Raccoon for Lemmy is on FDroid.

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rockerface 3 points a year ago

I second Jerboa recommendation

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Lizardking13 3 points a year ago

Any of these have similar gesture based navigation as sync? That's my favorite thing about it. I Just tried Voyager and it's alright, but I dislike the navigation.

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Lizardking13 2 points a year ago

Looks like jerboa has similar navigation, just not quite as polished. I'll roll with it for a bit and see how I feel in a few days.

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Twig 30 points a year ago

I haven't had any real problems with it recently. What doesn't work and what are the best alternatives?

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FooBarrington 22 points a year ago

The LW admins detailed some issues here: https://lemmy.world/post/23471887

The 0.19.4 release also broke marking posts as read in Sync for Lemmy. Although this isn't really something we consider a blocker, it's still worth mentioning, as there are still a lot of Sync for Lemmy users out there that haven't noticed this issue yet if they're only active on Lemmy.World. Over the last 2 weeks we've had nearly 5k active Sync for Lemmy users . This is unfortunately something that will break during the upgrade, as the API has changed in upstream Lemmy.

There are also additional issues with viewing comments on posts in local communities that appear to be related to the 0.19.4/0.19.5 release, appear to be a lot more serious. There have been various reports of posts showing with zero comments in Sync, while viewing them in a browser or another client will show various comments. It's not entirely clear to us right now what the full impact is and to what extent it can be mitigated by user actions, such as subscribing to communities. If anyone wants to research what is needed to restore compatibility and potentially even propose a patch for compatibility with both the updated and the previous API version we'll consider applying it as a custom patch on top of the regular Lemmy release.

If there won't be a Sync update in time for our update and we won't have a viable workaround available, you may want to check out !lemmyapps@lemmy.world to find potential alternatives.

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Twig 8 points a year ago

Thanks!

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Fake4000 17 points a year ago

That's one of the issues I had when on Reddit. The developer used to go AWOL for extended periods of time. Not an issue on Reddit but definitely an issue here. Since then, I have switched to infinity for Reddit and kept using free apps.

Now on lemmy, I still use free apps (mainly voyager) and wouldn't pay money for sync.

On an additional note, I see the developer of boost doing something similar.

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Sir_Kevin 17 points a year ago

But but.. I like Sync? I use it on both platforms and it seems to be fine.

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FooBarrington 10 points a year ago

I'm happy that you like Sync, I do too! But it hasn't been updated in a long time, and some features don't work anymore with up-to-date Lemmy instances. With coming updates, Sync will stop working entirely. The roadmap the dev talked about hasn't appeared in almost a year. At this point, new users should be made aware that buying Sync as-is is a bad idea.

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BakedCatboy 1 point a year ago

Have you not had any issues with all the comments of a thread being missing? About 30-40% of the time I open comments where it says there are anywhere between 3 and 20 comments just to find no comments. I open the thread in browser and all the comments are there. I'm having to constantly bounce between sync and Firefox just to read comments.

And no it has nothing to do with the selected languages, I tried selecting all languages in my settings and it makes no difference. Additionally, the same users whose comments are missing show up fine in other posts, and the bug affects the entire thread regardless of user, no comments are visible in the bugged threads.

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Sir_Kevin 1 point a year ago

I have had that happen a few times but they appear after dragging down to refresh. I just figured my internet connection was being wonky.

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BakedCatboy 1 point a year ago

Hmm that must be something different then, I can refresh a bunch and it will finish loading in under 1 second (so it doesn't seem like it's timing out or it would take several seconds at least) and it will just say "There are no comments", even though the comment count will show comments. I can go to any other thread and see comments and go back and the bugged threads stay empty.

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youngalfred 11 points a year ago

Will do - I jumped ship to Summit and haven't looked back. The only thing that would be nice to have here is an instance browser.

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unscholarly_source 11 points a year ago

Damn. As a die hard Sync for Reddit fan for years, donated lifetime license and having recently come back to Sync for Lemmy and feeling like it was a long lost friend, really really sad and heartbreaking to hear this.

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can 8 points a year ago

#why

I like the app, been with it for years, and I trust the dev. I get it. In his position I would unfortunately probably do the same.

And he actually showed up recently so something is in the works.

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kellenoffdagrid 6 points a year ago

Where did he show up, out of curiosity? I'm not seeing any activity from him on the Github issue tracker or his account here.

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can 4 points a year ago

DM re: my bug report. Not public so I wasn't going to say anything until I saw the panic here.

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drawerair 3 points a year ago

He can post here and on another platform (like Instagram) so the users won't think of switching.

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Fleur_ 4 points a year ago

Price level

Free

Huh?

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FooBarrington 0 points a year ago

Weird, how come I paid 20€ for it?

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Fleur_ 1 point a year ago

Idk why did you?

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FooBarrington 1 point a year ago

Come on, don't play stupid

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dumbcrumb 0 points a year ago

Not sure what you're talking about. I downloaded it for free off the play store.

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