The Play Store works exactly as designed.
It takes a search term, turns it into a list of completely random apps sorted by whatever makes Google the most money in in app payments and adverts, and then shows it to you.
What more did you want from a store run by the world's biggest advertising company?
They are hiding it deliberately if people are more likely to leave critical or negative reviews.
I can't leave reviews through the Google maps app either, the function is gone. If I open the mobile website, it's there again.
Fucking hypocrites.
The maps is annoying, look up hotels, they hide the website behind a drop down in the hopes you book through google...will I fuck.
If OSM had speed trap warnings I would be gone.
OSM does have speed trap warnings but someone would have had to add the speed trap for it to work. Organic Maps (or rather CoMaps, which I now use) shows me when there's a spred trap.
Waze has speed trap warnings. They don't have anything else (and were also bought out by Google), but for navigation, it rocks.
But then... It's just Google.
Dunno when, but been using Android since around Android 2, and I remember it only worsening over the years.
I avoid the play store as much as reasonably possible. F-Droid, Github/lab/etc, and FOSS alternatives are my first choices before venturing into that cesspit.
Yeah I have droidify on my phone but I had not installed a new app in a bit and my work profile blocked it. I deleted the work profile.
It was the mastodon app I wanted to review
I do agree. Also the change log for all app updates now are: stability and performance improvements
That's been like 10 years by now or more
I like the more plain approach that Aurora Store is going for. It is an alternative Frontend to the Google Play API, but has just apps and nothing else. Posting reviews seems pretty straight forward although I never did it.
It also let's you spoof some devices to download "incompatible" apps.
Thank you, I have seen it mentioned and nevwr pulled the trigger. Just installed and replaced default open links.
Some apps can detect they have not been installed through the play store and will refuse to work. My banking app pulls this bullshit, among others.
This has been happening more and more to me lately. Not the end of the world, and I still use Aurora Store for the majority of my apps, but it's concerning.
chatgpt does too and for some reason it doesn't work on rooted phones which makes no sense so gemini it is
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.mistral.chat
Try this one, personality is a bit more brief.
i mean you could just not have an AI app on your phone? i think you can live without that
I mean, I can live without for the brief period where we'll be needing our AIs to run remotely. It would be within months probably that we'll have some free GPT4All implementation (or similar) running on a phone. There's already whisperAI running locally at decent speeds on a phone for STT, and there's SherpaTTS running Kaldi TTS also with pretty realistic results...all fully local, all available in f-Droid. I don't think there's anything stopping your phone from running a lower distilled model locally, if your RAM allows it.
my point is why the fuck would one need any sort of gpt-like thing? are we seriously already at the point where people feel that is a necessary thing in daily life?
Ditto for YouTube. I always struggle to find my watch history and saved videos. And the fact search defaults to those stupid shorts.
I like to think it's because YouTube are trying to force new content on me, but it's probably partly just that I'm old.
I get "sign in to prove you're not a bot". Nah bud. It's bad when this is key information that should be publicly accessible. Like just now the video of Leavitt announcing Trump's decision on whether to get US directly involved in Iran/Israel war. This was a link from PBS.
Welcome to the droidymcdroidface-iest, Lemmyest (Lemmiest), test, bestest, phoniest, pluckiest, snarkiest, and spiciest Android community on Lemmy (Do not respond)! Here you can participate in amazing discussions and events relating to all things Android.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
1. All posts must be relevant to Android devices/operating system.
2. Posts cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
3. No spam, self promotion, or upvote farming. Sources engaging in these behavior will be added to the Blacklist.
4. Non-whitelisted bots will be banned.
5. Engage respectfully: Harassment, flamebaiting, bad faith engagement, or agenda posting will result in your posts being removed. Excessive violations will result in temporary or permanent ban, depending on severity.
6. Memes are not allowed to be posts, but are allowed in the comments.
7. Posts from clickbait sources are heavily discouraged. Please de-clickbait titles if it needs to be submitted.
8. Submission statements of any length composed of your own thoughts inside the post text field are mandatory for any microblog posts, and are optional but recommended for article/image/video posts.
Community Resources:
We are Android girls*,
In our Lemmy.world.
The back is plastic,
It's fantastic.
*Well, not just girls: people of all gender identities are welcomed here.
Our Partner Communities: