Liftoff!

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A mobile client for Lemmy running on iOS and Android

founded 1 year ago

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Appreciation post for Liftoff not collecting user data or injecting ads. (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was looking forward to trying Sync today now that it's live, but my enthusiasm was immediately dampened after seeing the "Data Safety" section on the Google Play store.

Liftoff has been great, and want to say thanks for making an awesome app. This will continue to be my daily driver.

Edit: for clarity, because the post got way bigger than I expected.

Sync looks like a fantastic app, and the dev/s should charge whatever they feel is fair for their efforts, even if that's through the usual ads + ad tracking.

My intent was just to post here in /c/Liftoff to thank the Liftoff devs for managing to somehow offer an awesome app without any of that.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You'd think that, but so many of these users complaining don't understand how ad serving works. They're acting like this is some outrageous conspiracy to gather user data by the dev himself, or are being willfully ignorant about the proof that none of ad tracking SDK even loads when you use either the one time removal or the subscription.

I really thought that most of the early adopter crowd for a federated service like this would be at least mildly technical. But no, that's a stupid assumption in hind sight.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly didn't know this and I'd consider myself pretty technical, just not very familiar with serving ads. This is really cool, how'd u learn this?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Right, and that's totally fair. But one might expect a more tech savvy userbase to at least try and understand what's going on or being said by other users. Instead, there's just a lot of parroting going on, which is disappointing and also kinda needlessly harmful to the app's / dev's reputation among the users here.

If you used the DuckDuckGo browser, it can act as a fake "VPN" to intercept and block tracking requests from other apps on your phone. Multiple users have shown in the comments of a bunch of different threads that none of the tracking links are firing off when you load / use the app if you've already paid for either the one-time support or the subscription model.