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.
I haven’t had any real problems with it recently. What doesn’t work and what are the best alternatives?
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.
Thanks!
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.
Price level
Free
Huh?
Weird, how come I paid 20€ for it?
Idk why did you?
Come on, don’t play stupid
Not sure what you’re talking about. I downloaded it for free off the play store.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and explain it, if you’re actually not understanding it.
Sync is a freemium app. You can use it for free, but you will have ads and tracking. Or you can pay a one-time fee to upgrade to premium, which removes ads and trackers. This upgrade costs 20€.
Just use an add-blocking DNS on your phone.
Why? I’m happy to support the developer of an application I use (as long as he actually uses the funds to fund further development).
Was it worth it?
Yes
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.
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.
#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.
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.
DM re: my bug report. Not public so I wasn’t going to say anything until I saw the panic here.
He can post here and on another platform (like Instagram) so the users won’t think of switching.
FOSS options available via F-Droid:
And via the IzzyOnDroid repository:
- Thunder
- Interstellar (also handles Mbin)
Go FOSS, avoid the Play store, be free.
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.
Racoon is dead and Eternity hasn’t been updated in a while.
Racoon
No, it’s not someone forked it.
Eternity
Will get update in future.
Ooh, do you have a link to the racoon fork?
Raccoon for Lemmy is on FDroid.
Right now I feel like Connect is giving me the most Sync like experience.
Try Eternity, it’s good.
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.
Yeah, the really slow updates and unfinished stuff sucks, but from the 6 or so apps I’ve tried, it was still the best.
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.
I second Jerboa recommendation
I’ve been using Voyager for nearly a year and have no complaints.
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?
I don’t believe I’ve set anything specifically for it, but a single tap on an image goes full screen.
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.That happens for me for any link that can’t be handled in Voyager, but I think when it comes to images the thumbnail doesnt load either…
Out of curiosity, is it maybe your instance and how its caching? Have you tried other instances? Let me grab a random post that works for me as an example.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37713149 works for me for reference. Tap and right to fill screen.
Edit: BTW, tapping these images will also go full screen. Not sure if you have that issue with embedded so figured I’d mention.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/21931444
This post is a link to an image rather than an image uploaded to an instance like the one you linked - in sync, you can just press the thumbnail to see it full screen (not at full resolution, but high enough). Voyager correctly loads the thumbnail, but I don’t see a way to expand the image without opening the webpage.
I assume that’s what they’re talking about. I’d also like the same…
Ah, gotcha.
So sync is pulling the image from the page, since its not a direct link to the image itself voyager goes to the page.
Thats fair. Has it been brought up to @aeharding@vger.social directly? I agree thats handy.
But but… I like Sync? I use it on both platforms and it seems to be fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
