Google's curation of the Play Store, while protecting their own economic interests, feels a bit like a dark pattern. The fact that adding " n" to most keywords prompts " no ads" in the suggestions shows how popular this is.
If I search for "tuner", I get two sponsored results first, then five ad-containing results with average 4.4 rating, then an ad-free app with 4.9 stars.
My preference would be searching by rating with a minimum number of installs. Even using the 4.5+ filter seems to be the quickest way to find completely ad-free apps. But, what really works best (but never quickest) for many apps is to find an APK somewhere else, like Github.
> But, what really works best (but never quickest) for many apps is to find an APK somewhere else, like Github.
My phone isn't totally de-Googled, but I always make a point of seeing if what I need can be found on F-Droid, and only searching the Play Store if nothing there will serve.
Sorry for the offtopic, but can you tell me the name of the ad-less tuner app? I've been searching for one, but the best I found was Fender's. Which is pretty ok, too.
I appreciate that you can choose the microphone source, change detection parameters, and easily select off-440 tunings. It's responsive and accurate enough for my playing.
The only issue I ever had was on the Fairphone 3. Starting a few months ago, if I had Google Assistant always listening, the tuner would stop working. I've since disabled Assistant and changed phones.
I also ended up with Fender's, but it wasn't terribly responsive so eventually purchased a strobe tuner [0]. Has some disadvantages over something like a smartphone, but better for my simple usage.
How can you have an electronic strobe tuner? I understand the mechanics of mechanical ones (they're really quite simple), but how can you have one with an LCD display? Is it merely a weird way of outputting the same electronic tuning you can get from any FFT-based tuning, and they're just riding the reputation of the mechanical devices?
If I search for "tuner", I get two sponsored results first, then five ad-containing results with average 4.4 rating, then an ad-free app with 4.9 stars.
My preference would be searching by rating with a minimum number of installs. Even using the 4.5+ filter seems to be the quickest way to find completely ad-free apps. But, what really works best (but never quickest) for many apps is to find an APK somewhere else, like Github.