Have you considered people are mad because:
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Same purchase was a lot cheaper when it was Reddit.
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Reddit already ran ads, so having an app who ran ads of its own was fine.
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Monoteizing a FOSS project in a way that doesn’t help the maintainers of that project may not be seen as ethical.
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Having a subscription for features that don’t cost anything to serve (highlighting users can be done locally for instance) might feel like an artificial limitation to drive sales.
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The fact that it launched with both a transaction (not a small one, as it costs more than any non-professional app I bought) and a subscription service in literally the first beta of the app.
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Combination of these with all the alternatives being all-free (both in price and as in freedom) might make people think few times before paying for this app.
Personally, I really dislike the price, find subscription meh but I absolutely adore Sync’s UX. But honestly, without few things changing, I don’t see myself recommending Sync to friends.
My thoughts about your first few points:
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I, and many others it seems, think the Sync for Reddit app was priced almost too low. Only a few dollars for an app isn’t sustainable for the dev in the long run. I believe people using reddit sync with ads actually supported the dev more than people buying the app.
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The reddit API was free, so it technically didn’t have ads if you used some ad-free (FOSS) 3rd party app. Sync for lemmy isn’t any different in that sense.
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Sure, the lemmy devs and instances also need money to run the service. People are free to and should donate to them as well. Sync for lemmy, however, isn’t costing instances any more than FOSS apps.
The rest of your points are just personal preference, really. If you like the app, buy it or use it with ads. If you don’t like the app, use something else. Honestly surprised by how much hate an app no one is forcing people to use is getting.
