Hacker News Reader

Comment by PennRobotics | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> My preference would be searching by rating with a minimum number of installs

This problem has a better solution - sort/search by the lower confidence bound for the rating: https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...

> 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.

Same here. Also, using aptoide for Android TV.

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 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.

[0]: https://www.thomann.de/intl/ee/peterson_stroboclip_hd.htm

I do have a Boss TU-2, but I'm sometimes in a situation where I'm too lazy to use a cable but have my phone handy (because I record ideas on my phone)

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?

I use TE Tuner and like it. I don't use all the features, but the tuner and metronome are pretty great.

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.

Would prefer max installs filter instead of min to filter out the bigger apps that have budgets for seo

Reply on news.ycombinator.com