I was planning to wait and see what Boost has to offer before deciding if I should pay $20 to remove ads on Sync, but seeing this has convinced me to delete the app for good. Even Reddit isn’t half as bad as Sync when it comes to trackers and shady ads.
Try it and report back. I’m genuinely curious to see if it’s what you’re claiming it to be on your end, cause I have yet to see any FOSS Lemmy apps getting triggered in DDG, no matter what links I click. Maybe I’m just lucky?
The biggest alarm in this thread is everyone thinking that apps are at the whim of advertising companies and completely innocent on their part. They are not. Ads can work without trackers and devs can prevent users from being tracked within embedded browsers.
I have seen multiple foss lemmy apps do this. Here’s what I’ll do though. I am going to use the sync app for a day and not click any external links. I’ll then post the results here and we can compare.
After doing it for a few minutes the only thing the app uses seems to be Google trackers.