First I want to preface that I actually never used Sync for Reddit, I always used RIF but I wanted to give Sync for Lemmy a shot and see what it was all about.

A few things from my perspective:

1. So I’m using the combined BottomNavigation style, but finding settings or other options doesn’t seem all that intuitive. Some of the things, like how to switch from Everything to Subscribed for my feed, I found by accident. Where to buy the Ad removal was also rather hidden, etc…
2. The elephant in the room… Pricing… as a developer myself I get needing to make enough money to sustain your projects, and I get that there’s a lot less users on Lemmy than Reddit, but the prices for the subscriptions just seem outrageous. The problem as I see it, is that there’s already a healthy competition for Lemmy Apps out there today and most are completely free and have no ads as-is. Some may even be operating in the red, but still $2/mo, $17/yr, $100/lifetime still seems a bit much for essentially:

• No Ads (I’ve got a PiHole, so honestly I don’t see any ads at the moment anyway)
• Cloud Backup – backup of what? My login? My app settings? The former seems concerning, the later I don’t see much value as I only have a single Phone. If I get a new phone, sure it might save me a few minutes re setting it back up. There’s not that many settings at the moment that needed customizing. And adding too many makes the app too confusing.
• Highlight / Tag users – Ok this seems interesting but not quite worth $2/mo IMO.
• Translate text – I can do this in the web app already just by highlighting a comment. But to be critical here, /most/ of the content is already in English, and I don’t subscribe to any foreign language communities at the moment, so this at least doesn’t have any value to me.
• Select text from image – Ok, another interesting feature but still not quite at $2/mo
• Push notifications (coming soon) – I’m really wondering how this is going to work personally, but this is a much needed feature, at least just for private messages. Probably the feature I’m most excited about.
• Import / export subscriptions – This honestly needs to be built into Lemmy itself, but there’s also a handful of user scripts and other tools other developers have already written that can do this.

Keep in mind I don’t have a frame of reference for what the prices were in Sync for Reddit, but cut the prices to about a 1/3rd or 1/4th of what they are now and they seem to be more inline with the value that the app provides over the other apps.

3. The privacy policy. It’s a lot longer than I’d hope for a Lemmy app. I’m assuming most of the data being collected is for advertising, but it’s still concerning to me.

I don’t mean to sounds critical in all of this. The app is probably one of the smoothest and best looking out there so far, but the value to money ratio just isn’t there.