Anyone else think the play store has had such a constant decline to the point where you can barely find an app without being flooded with ads. I pretty much only use f droid at this point because the quality of apps is just higher
Not only the Playstore, same is true for the iOS Appstore as well. You only get served subscription begging crap there.
You are not even allowed to call a shitty app a shitty app.
As you said, F-Droid is the way to go. But if you want to browse the Play store without ads, use Aurora. It’s an open-source client for Google play that doesn’t show ads and doesn’t even require you to log in with Google.
I use Aurora store if I absolutely need an application from the Google Garden. But otherwise, yes, I agree. I use almost exclusively fdroid.
Fdroid is my favorite. But yeah the app store is having some issues.
Yeah man, you can search for the exact name of the app you’re looking for, and it will appear 4th or 5th on the list. Fuck Google.
One thing in Google’s defence (I know…) is that it may be the makers of those other apps successfully optimising their apps search terms and SEO tags and so on, so that they appear when the user has searched for a different app.
Obviously it’s still on Google for relying too much on an algorithm that doesn’t prioritise the app name enough, but people gaming the system doesn’t help either.
Nah, this changed literally overnight. One day search worked, next time I used it, it was this shit.
It was clearly a change by Google.
Aurora Store: “Allow me to introduce myself”
I find it’s more about the ad and tracker filled apps on the store instead of the store itself.
That’s why Aurora is cool, it shows you the Exodus report for each app
I solely live out on fdroid and do not have play store and let me tell you it is really really better.
The playstore is just flooded with garbage apps.
Once my apps are installed, the play store is only there for updates. Searching for new apps on the store is just rubbish.
They used to have a nice obvious detail page for every app, now I get some small entry, a bunch of other apps that I might also want to install (spoiler, I don’t), and it’s harder to see useful information.
Do they really think I’ve gone to the Play Store to install my bank’s app, but I might also want to install a different bank’s app?
Yo dawg I heard you like installing bank apps with your banks app
Similarly, this old tweet: https://twitter.com/GirlFromBlupo/status/982156453396996096
Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one. Necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict. No matter how temptingly you email me, I’m not going to think, oh go on then, just one more toilet seat, I’ll treat myself.
Yeah, at some point, I was experimenting with basically firewall apps to prevent tracking and realized that around 99% of apps on the Play Store have tracking built-in. As I later learned, that’s because Google heavily encourages it in their app development tooling. Either way, F-Droid it is for me.
The question is how to help the unwashed masses learn to use F-Droid.
Say how to get started…