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What are some of your worst purchasing regrets?
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this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Asklemmy
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You had me in the first part, but that last paragraph reeks of Apple fanboyism.
Anyway, I also had an iPad 2 back in the day and it was a pretty solid machine coming from media players and digital photo frames of yore. Also an amazing mobile gaming experience compared to the cramped iPod touch or iPhone of the time. But terribly frustrating if you wanted anything outside the walled garden, even something as ubiquitous as Adobe Flash support.
What plumbercraic says though is absolutely the case today. Some of my family use Apple devices. Mind-blowing what ad- and subscription-infested apps they endure on the regular. Sometimes they'll ask me to recommend friendlier apps and I really wish iOS had its F-Droid equivalent. Yes, the Play Store also has terrible apps, but when only the Apple App Store exists, I have to spend time hunting for the one good app, which could just as well enshittify the next year.
Excuse me? Are you trying to say that side-loaded apps are more free of ads than those in app stores? What motivates a developer to release an ad-free side loaded app while refusing to submit it to (or failing to get it approved in) an app store?
How is this specifically an iPad issue and not an app developer issue?
I'd like to know, because I don't have a Google device or account, how the Google Play Store is superior to the Apple App Store when it comes to ad or subscription supported software.
Side-loaded apps could be anything, ad-free or ad-infested. It costs money to publish an app to Apple's App Store, even if the app is going to be free. For commercial developers, that's an incentive to monetize and recuperate the $99/year Apple charges. For open source developers, that's a barrier to entry.
On the Android side, free and ad-free apps are correlated with being open source. Many open source developers are philosophically against publishing on Google's Play Store, or at least know that their main audience does not want to sign up for a Google account to download it from the Play Store. But that's not saying that the Play Store is inherently superior to Apple's App Store. It just happens to overlap with open source apps that are guaranteed to be free and ad-free, given the lower barrier to entry (one-time $25 fee).
This is more an exception than the rule so far, but one final case is an open-source developer wants to publish their perfectly safe and legitimate app, but is rejected. This happened to Organic Maps on the Play Store.
Contrast these app stores with F-Droid, where users do not need to sign up for an account and developers can publish for free without handing over personally identifiable information. However, it relies on a form of sideloading that is not possible on iOS devices, at least outside of the EU.