what's the point of judging? Sync is the only app so far that has full, thoughtful support for foldable phones and the dev genuinely has been putting in a lot of work into it. I bought the No Ads IAP and I'm perfectly happy with it, but there are so many good options now for those that want something completely free.
Because the open source community has been full of a bunch of people who built whole personalities on shitting on anything not FOSS. And even though they now have an opportunity to bring a lot more people into the community than before they'd rather play these stupid arrogant superiority games instead of just letting people enjoy things how they want to enjoy them.
Cause FOSS people are worse than vegans. It's like Linux users but infinitely worse.
FOSS ≠ better or good. Most of the FOSS Lemmy apps are usability nightmares right now. The only reason I was using jerboa for so long is because sync wasn't out yet
FOSS apps often suffer from mediocre UX/UI since the expected audience are power users, but it alienates users that aren't. They're functional for those who need it, yes, but is the GUI high quality? More often than not, they aren't.
I'm not saying FOSS can't have bad UI, like Blender for example, but those are the exception, not the rule.
For me, Connect and Thunder are getting there, but they don't have the same level of quality and finesse as Sync. Though to be fair, Sync has a decade of work put into it.
do you really have a hard time understanding how different people have different preferences and how familiarity works or do you just like being smug?
as for "trackers" and ads you will find that unless they are intrusive about 99% of the population doesn't give a fuck, even on a fairly niche site like lemmy the majority won't give a fuck.
I love FOSS but I got pretty used to the official reddit app, and Sync is the only app that feels like if the reddit app wasn't buggy and laggy. The paid aspect doesn't bother me because I would have donated to whatever app I use anyway, at $5/mo the $20 one time ad removal option makes sense if I use it for more than 4 months so it's worth it to me.