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Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

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21–30 of 165 posts

Re: Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

#21

With “Aurora Store” you can filter out apps with ads, paid apps, or GSF dependent apps. Updating apps requires manually pressing “install”, but other than that it's pretty neat.

the problem i faced is that aurora store is disliked by google and my account was terminated. would recommend though.

Your google account was terminated because you installed a different app store on your phone?

Re: Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

#22

I always wondered why all these stores are so fucking awful to filter. Is it calculated ?

Both Google and Apple monetize app discovery by selling advertising spots and such, and both collect revenues from inside apps (be it the mandatory-through-them in-app purchasing systems or advertising). As they are monopolies on their respective platforms, they have no reason to improve your experience, and so they do not care if you find the best app.

They care that you find the app that generates them the most revenue, and that's exactly what they're going to do.

Re: Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

#23

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…

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.

Free Universal Tuner, by Dmitry Pogrebnyak.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.aterlux.gui...

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.

Re: Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

#24

I always wondered why all these stores are so fucking awful to filter. Is it calculated ?

I imagine it would be easy to add a search filter for ads or no ads, but they don't.

Are there any third party search interfaces? Seems like it would be pretty easy to add automatic checking for ads.

Re: Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

#25

I'm actually glad to see editorializing disallowed in app titles. If everybody did it, the store would be a mess. I mean, it's already a mess, but even more so.

"No ads" isn't editorializing, though. Unlike "best" or "#1", it's a statement of fact, and a fact that is probably useful to shoppers.

Re: Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

#26

I'm actually glad to see editorializing disallowed in app titles. If everybody did it, the store would be a mess. I mean, it's already a mess, but even more so.

But the need does not exists in a void - the store does not allow to filter in searches apps with ads or microtransactions.

Re: Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

#27
I really want a way to search for ad-free apps. I don't bother very much with the Android store because of this. If I want my 4 year old to use my phone I don't want her clicking some ad and leaving the app by accident.

As a result, I only have apps by the BBC and a couple of others.

Re: Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

#28
Users are interested in apps that have no ads. Whether or not an app has ads is not part of the standard app info fields, so while publishers could lie in the title, where else can the users find out whether there are ads and why couldn't Google instead just ban apps that lie about having no ads instead of outright banning "no ads" in the title?

I think Google makes no money from free ad-less apps, so it is plausible that allowing free ad-less apps to promote themselves as "no ads" (over apps with ads or paid apps) is not directly financially beneficial to Google and is perhaps even harmful. You can see the disincentives at work here.

Re: Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

#29

I'm actually glad to see editorializing disallowed in app titles. If everybody did it, the store would be a mess. I mean, it's already a mess, but even more so.

"No ads" isn't editorializing, though. Unlike "best" or "#1", it's a statement of fact, and a fact that is probably useful to shoppers.

Could this be in response to apps indicating that they don't have ads even though they do?

Re: Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

#30
So, let's be clear here. The problem is not that they've prohibited people from putting this information in the app title. The problem comes if they've done so without introducing another way for the user to express their preference for ad-free apps. E.g. it should even work better if, hypothetically, the search function prioritized ad-free apps anyway when the user puts "no ads" in the search box.

I can't tell if this is the case right now because, well, the store is still full of apps with "no ads" in the title. Those are still coming up first.

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