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/
i use lemmy on firefox browser mobile and desktop?
Try the Photon WebApp client, there is public instances but you can self-host yours ! Still early but enjoying it so far !
My favorite app is Firefox 😉
(or alternatively: Tor - its also great, many Lemmy instances are Tor friendly)
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 guess I’m just legitimately confused about how to feel about it all.
The freedom of Lemmy and the fediverse let’s people choose how to interact with it.
If a user is looking for a free to use , open source, ad-free experience then that’s their choice.
If others are happy to pay for an app because they prefer the experience that app provides them they can choose to do so.
I also wouldn’t spend time in my day coming into defend organizations that want to monetize on open source community projects either.
OP read that Boost may contain code used for tracking, then started spewing some conspiracy that “Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more!” without any proof or any actual research.
This isn’t a case of defending some giant corporation, it’s just stopping tedious drama before it spreads.
If you check OPs profile they’ve been spreading this for over a week. When I first saw this thread the masses were heavily upvoting the conspiracy and downvoting anyone disagreeing.
OP read that Boost may contain code used for tracking, then started spewing some conspiracy that “Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more!” without any proof or any actual research.
This has actually been on my mind for a while now. Louis Rossmann and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race. He and his ilk talk about profiling in terms so sensationalist (“data stealing”, “spying”) that any connection to reality goes out the window and people become conspiratorial and paranoid. All reasoning about why it happens gets flattened to “they’re evil” and there’s no way to actually engage with the reasons.
I think I am one of the very few people who objects the correlation between streaming services DRM and data collection Louis talks about in his video where he tries to stream Netflix from a Linux box and gets 720p. “Piracy is absolutely justified” or sth like that was the title of the video.
You’re missing the part where the lemmy and instance staff needs to get fed too. Donate to your instance the same as you would buy this app. If you use a free service for many hours, and you can spare a couple bucks, then spare it.
Nothing is immune to enshitification, not even non-shitified things.
To enshitify is human (it seems).
To grow past & beyond it is to stride for greatness, for the way forward for society to evolve.
Support foss you would like to see in the future, evolving into next gens.
And no, I do not mean support with ads of the evil megacorps!! I mean support by directly sending devs coffee or whatever the nice donation button says.
On join-lemmy there is small warning for every closed source app
!thunder_app@lemmy.world is great.
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.
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AntennaPod is like 10x better than pocketcasts. Anytime someone asks for a podcast app, Foss or not, Antennapod is the first one brought up.
This is completely natural common sense for you and me, but to other people its alien to live with the “guilty until proven innocent” mindset that needs to be applied to software.
Good work bringing this to the attention of others.
I agree that Jerboa is good. If anyone wants another option, then Connect For Lemmy is clean, simple, and updated frequently. I’m nothing to do with Connect, just someone that has tried loads of Lemmy apps on Android, and has settled on Connect.
Connect dev here. In addition to no trackers we also have no ad SDKs, or analytics of any kind. Cheers!
Kuro and Connect are both 10/10
Isn’t it possible to provide an ad supported version without tracking?
Ads generally come with tracking, since the advertiser wants to know their ad was seen / effective. Some ad systems might be better than others, but I don’t have experience there
I know Mozilla is working on ‘Privacy respecting ads’, which was also controversial: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/article/a-privacy-first-solution-that-meets-advertisers-needs/
How would that work? You want the Boost dev to create their own “ethical ads” network?
Yeah someone would need to create an ad network according to what Mozilla is envisioning, then Boost would have to utilize that and add support for it. There’s an extra step involved. 😅
Well – two extra steps. The first one is huge, which is to create an ad network devoid of the tracking that companies salivate for, then there is Boost adopting it. The latter seems highly likely and a small change. The former is huge and feels unlikely in today’s world.
Sync is also pretty good
It has the same trackers problem as Boost.
I remembered Boost from the good old days a while back and am using it alongside voyager. It’s not as great as I remembered, so I’ll probably stick with Voyager. My home network keeps me safe of ads though 😉
Nice, I’m on the same boat. Voyager is superior to boost
Thanks. Just uninstalled it.
good now delete every other app on your phone that contains Google ads
Difficult for Android users.
that’s the point
Big 'yet you live in society. Curious" vibes.
i just thought it’s a bit useless to delete an app “because it has Google trackers” and then keep using 23 other apps that have Google trackers
But that’s one less app and there are great alternatives, so why continue using one that tracks you?
Because it doesn’t?
It does. Check the official privacy policy, 9 mentions of trackers as well as the extremely limited options for opting out of the trackers.
I have bought the premium version because it was really cheap so no it doesn’t track me
Use this app to make sure. It installs a local VPN to check connections, needs no root.
You do you, most goes with what’s free and there are plenty of good free options available.
Ads are a bad way of funding the development, especially for Lemmy, a place where a lot of people are increasingly privacy-minded.
Ads are a bad way of funding the development, especially for Lemmy
couldn’t agree more! that’s why I bought the premium version
sure, hope you enjoy your free apps while they last
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.
Can check out Eternity
Thunder has a toggle for Material You
YSK also that the paid version does not have ads or trackers
How do you know if you paid for the app? Can’t find that section in my profile and I don’t remember if I did.
Well simple, have you seen ads?
And, importantly, If your account is paid it never even loads the libraries or initializes the ad systems so there is zero data going to these trackers.
I don’t use this app (I use Eternity), but there’s nothing shady going on here. Developing an app isn’t free and it isn’t unfair for the developer to want to earn a living.
Yeah that’s why I use the duckduckgo app tracking protection
Interesting
Edit: Doesn’t work alongside VPN
if you have a VPN, check to see if they offer an option to block trackers and ads. many of them do.
Glad I stick with Thunder.
I have no problems with devs making money on their work. But ads are a privacy violation for me.
If Thunder ever went this route I’d immediately fork.
Boost is great though, and the low cost to remove ads is worth it. Devs need to eat and stuff too, I just choose to support them directly instead of seeing ads.
I’m sure it’s great, I haven’t tried it in a while, though. I’ve also contributed to Thunder so I’m biased. A while back I tried them all, and personally found Thunder to be the most feature rich, which is why I went that way (and added tablet support).
Voyager is the best Lemmy client on iOS or Android both, with Jerboa being a close second.
I tried and disliked both of those. They worked fine they just felt bad. Bad to digging around for clients.
Or just use a browser, ffs.
everything doesnt need to be an app.
especially when its nothing but a goddamn webbrowser, wrapped in an app, with less protection.
Why use a browser?
Just learn how to parse raw HTTP responses. That’s all a browser does, with less protection.
Nope, you can’t actually do that anymore since there’s SSL in the way. I tried anyway, though, just for giggles:
drath@machine:~$ telnet lemm.ee 80 Trying 2606:4700:20::681a:5f3... Connected to lemm.ee. Escape character is '^]'. GET / <html> <head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head> <body> <center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center> <hr><center>cloudflare</center> </body> </html> Connection closed by foreign host.Of course I can curl and wget, but that feels against the spirit of hardcore reading the raw data.
They’re not just browsers, they’re accessing the posts via an API and presenting it in a bespoke manner with purpose-built controls.
That’s good because it’s faster and lower-data than a webpage, and it’s easier and faster to use on mobile.
Not every app is just a web browser, that’s a particular kind of lazy app created by the app hype bubble like 20 years ago.
I really don’t know anything about the technicalities of apps, but you should try http://phtn.app/ on mobile, it’s UI is pretty good.
That being said if there was an app for it I would totally prefer that over a webpage in my browserI use it on desktop, despite some bugs from time to time I really enjoy the experience and slick design ! It’s still in early alpha so honestly I am impressed !
That’s very laggy for me, whereas my lemmy app, voyager, is extremely smooth.
It’s building a general purpose UI as a webpage which then has to be interpreted via your browser which then serves the UI up to you. Because this browser has to handle literally whatever is being thrown at it at all times, there is a lot of overhead and extra processes running to make it work correctly.
All of the graphics are equivalent, every line between every element, every button, every image is represented in the same data that the text is, so the phone is interpreting and rendering many times more stuff.
In contrast, a native app takes the bare text & media data and renders it in native controls, so the phone is able take a tiny amount of data and fit it into a template that renders natively on the phone. It’s doing orders of magnitude less work.
