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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.
What about herewego? I find it WAY better than comaps. But im in bumfuck US maybe thats why
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.
Waze has been owned by Google longer than it's existed on its own, for several years now.
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
So instead of a rotten peach, you went for the rotten strawberry.
Odd.
? in what sense
You want a peach or strawberry, ideally a peach, but they're both rotten. Instead of just getting rid of the rotten fruit, you picked a rotten strawberry.
You want to use an AI slop machine (rotten peach), but it doesn't work on your device because reasons, so instead of not using an AI slop machine (throwing away the rotten fruit), you chose to use a different AI slop machine (rotten strawberry) that does work on your device.
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?
Hey thanks!
I guess I already had it installed on my phone. Maybe from a previous recommendation.
Will be using this more & more. Not sure when this change happened, but lately there's always a sponsored link at the top of the search results in Play Store. No bueno
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
Another route one can go that takes a bit of work is Obtainium. Hand-pick the apps you want to show up and feed their GitHub, F-Droid, etc. links to manage them. Since F-Droid has some issues with how they build packages, it can be used sparingly but not avoided then.
Go app by app until your dependence on the Play Store goes away. Then disable or uninstall (probably can only disable on most phones, I've seen anyway) the Play Store completely. Slow way to gain independence from crapware. You can then export your Obtainium config to a JSON file to import on future phones/other phones so you don't have to duplicate the work.
Some bonus points, the non-Play version of one app I use shrinks from 120MB to 30MB when all the Google dependencies are stripped. You also gain back functionality like full filesystem access and other things Google forces apps to remove from the Play Store flavor.
More freedom. Faster apps. Less overhead. Less Google crap. Not a big scary transition.
Thanks I just installed obtainium from fdroid. I've been using it and Izzy for a while. Can you list a few apps that you use obtainium to manage as examples of apps that you prefer to manage that way?
I can't post reviews on apps. I get a network error message. I assume this is from my DNS level tracker and ad block lists.
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.
I'm not usually in the habit of defending the google play store, but I just opened it to see if I could figure out how to leave a review and it's right on the app's page, with five huge stars waiting to be clicked and a button underneath that which says write a review. I honestly did not think that difficult to find, and I didn't need to click into anything once on the app's page, so I'd hardly call it hidden.
It happened slowly over time. 🥲
I really hate it when I search for an app the search result is on the right and the sponsored result is on the left. It makes zero sense and they only do it so people misclick and Google can charge the sponsored app for that. It's the kind of shit that just makes the world a worse place, in the name of earning a few more bucks. Google could have made billions forever and be the good guys, instead they choose to be assholes because number must go up.