I normally use the Aurora frontend, but I used Google’s app to check something. I couldn’t help but notice that when I swiped and then let go, the page would barely move past the point I had let go. It had no momentum whatsoever. As soon as I got past the ads, scrolling was back to normal and the exact same flinging motion would send me down by at least a screen’s worth.
Has anyone else noticed this?
Yes. Same has been happening on YouTube for me. It’ll stick right on an ad.
I’ll check those out, thanks.
Entire Play Store front page is sluggish on my pixel 6a. Everything is an ad now.
I thought I was the only one!
Here I’m using a Google branded phone and yet some Google services are slow/sluggish? How embarrassing.
Apple is scrutinizing details like bevels and curves, where Google doesn’t give a fuck about how their one apps work on a flagship phone?
At this point, the play store has such a monopoly that they can do whatever the fuck they want. That’s why there are so many ads.
In my opinion, software that can be considered required for hardware that you’ve paid for to work (OS/system level apps) should not be allowed to have ads by law. It’s also a double infraction when they bait’n’switch you by slowly rolling out more and more ads on a phone you already bought.
There’s a FOSS app for just about everything. You can also use Micro G to replace Google Services, so there’s almost no reason for using anything Google on an Android phone.
My apps all work perfectly, and my phone definitely isn’t sluggish. Can you give any examples?
it’s a very convenient place for the app to load the next page of content…
Playing devil’s advocate here, the old store system I worked for always inserted cross-sellers at each page-break, too. It was just how the underlying code worked, it first loaded a batch of products, checked whether the user was supposed to see them, then figured out cross-sellers for it.
But by nature of that, if you say load 50 products at a time, you end up with those 50 being in the list of returned objects found, followed by the 5 (in our case) ads. So by nature, once someone scrolls to the ads, a short jitter happens as the system loads the next 50 objects for sale (and the next 5 crosssellers).
It might just be that the ad is bogging down the device, rather than a change to the scrolling behaviour. I’ve definitely had my phone heat up noticeably when it’s trying to load an ad.
That’s a fair point. It’s so strange that it does that, especially when the ad is functionally identical to a normal piece of content for that medium.
Dont have ads in mine. Are you not blocking ads at the DNS level? I assume anybody thats not must enjoy them.
Also, check your logic. You have a phone branded by an ADVERTISING company, many Androids apps are free (to you) because of ads, while the same apps are paid ones on iOS. How do you think that works?
I have a Pixel, run Graphene, sanbox the play store and block ads at the DNS level, seeing ads is a choice you’re making.
Experience-based vendor lock-in while getting bait’n’switched with increasing amounts of ads is not a consumer choice. To assert otherwise is extremely ignorant of the power dynamics between individual consumers and the duopoly that we have in the phone market.
I do block ads on the DNS level. You’re probably running a modded version of the client without realizing it.
