I've been using Sync for at least three years, and I've been a vocal advocate of the app, but I don't feel right paying for ad free anymore.
I am unable to transfer my paid account to my new phone and yet Google continues to take out my $2.13 every month. I understand everyone needs time away sometimes but I don't see how LJD feels right accepting people's money while providing ZERO support for months on end, and never bothering to at least appoint a maintainer in his absence.
I see issues piling up with this app and I'm forced to look at ads while LJD does whatever he wants and takes my money. I feel stupid that I've been paying this man for years to provide a good experience just to be taken for a ride like this.
I had bought the lifetime pro back in the Reddit days, I paid for pro subscription while using Lemmy, and at this point I'm just done. I hate writing this post because I've been a happy, continual premium user of this app for literally years, but there's only so much I can handle.
I'm not sure what extra features sync offers but most apps don't have ads? I'm using Jerboa personally. It was a bit unstable a year ago but it's fine now. Images don't load sometimes, but I'm not sure if that is the apps fault.
Before LJD had Sync moved to Lemmy post-API I was using Jerboa and back then it was super buggy and slow because it was a freshly minted app. It's nice to see how well the FOSS alternatives have been catching up.
Jerboa is solid, but it's not feature-rich. Not great for media browsing. It's still my main client since I use Lemmy mostly for text, not images or videos.
Eternity and Voyager are worth looking at, too.
I appreciate the word up, I'm on Voyager now and I'm happy with it. I've been playing with other clients for other services I've been using. Lately I'm getting into Gemblogs and finding nice ways to view and eventually contribute to it myself, so I'll probably stick to that for my "stripped down text experience", and keep Lemmy for more visual stuff. Pixelfed has been a great experience to get into, too! The open internet is so much fun to explore. It's a wonderful time to be a netizen.
When I moved to lemmy (Don't know if was last year or this year already) all the other apps I tested was really bad at discoverability. On Sync you can open and instance and see the list of communities in there for example.