TLDR: I love sideloaded apps and they r a godsend

So I’ve been using sideloaded yt and Spotify and now I can NEVER go back. Makes me feel like a PEASANT if I do.

So a couple weeks ago I went on a 4 hour drive and sadly my sidestore time expired and I couldn’t renew due to ap ID it so I had to wait a week and by the time I would drive another 4 hours back. And let me tell you FREE SPOTIFY SUCKS ASS. I can’t go back or scrub through the songs, I can only do 6 skips per hour and replay COUNTS AS THE 6, luckily I use a vpn which blocked other company ads but SPOTIFY HAS THEIR OWN DAMN STUPID ADS EVERY 3 SONGS. And I couldn’t add songs to queue by swiping and I had to tap on the three dots and add to queue which I can’t do while on the highway. And of course I can’t play a specific song, I can’t even decide whether I want shuffle or not. And I didn’t even wanna try yt with no playing off the app or while the phone is off.

It’s as if getting into sideloading, piracy, and modding made me feel true online freedom and I can’t wait or imagine the feeling I’m going to have when I start self hosting. I’m definitely going to donate to these projects due to the improvement in my life they contributed to.

  • ranzispa@mander.xyzEnglish
    3·
    15 hours ago

    I do not give them any money as I do not use their service in any form. However, there are a few reasons you may want to if you do use their services.

    1. If you enjoy the service it is indeed in your interest that it is profitable and keeps on working.
    2. You’re saving yourself on installing on your phone a cracked application which likely contains some malware.
    3. If you dislike Spotify for what they do and how they behave, you’re better off not using the service altogether.

    And I mean, they do offer you a way to listen to music for free anyway, they just have you listen to some advertisement. It is a fair exchange in my opinion. The pricing of their subscription is also fair in my opinion, it’s some 10-15€/month and you can listen to all the music you want all the time, that is about the price of a single disc. If you don’t like the advertisement and don’t want to pay to listen, I’d turn to Soulseek rather than trying to use their service for free.

    I myself prefer to have my own music collection and to buy the music from musicians I like, but I do see the advantages of a service like Spotify and I feel it is pretty cool that they offer their huge catalogue for free to anyone in the world.

    • Techlos@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      As a musician, fuck Spotify, they pay next to nothing to the artists. Please pirate if Spotify is the only other option.

      • Ilandar@lemmy.todayEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        Pirate and put the saved subscription fees towards song and album purchases (from Bandcamp, for example) is the best way. It’s the same with YouTube Premium - use a third party client to block the ads and save the subscription fee to donate to channels directly. It annoys me when people try to claim the moral high ground for paying subscription fees to big companies when they’re actually just part of the problem.