Yeah, piggybacking off of the hard work all the devs and instances put in is really annoying. Sync brought Reddit to Lemmy (unfortunately). Time to move on I guess.
'Piggybacking' is a weird way to put it when good clients are an important part of a website, and Sync is a fantastic one. That's one of the big reasons people moved off of reddit, no?
also, as a closed-source app, there's no guarantee that actually removes tracking. i'm not going to say sync does this, because that would be libel, but there's nothing stopping sync collecting everything it can collect anyways and selling them to the highest bidder, just not showing actual ads in-app
The yearly subscription is for Ultra. The ad removal option in profile -> remove ads is permanent.
LJ has always been very open with the community the whole time Sync was for reddit. You could post about it in !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world if you're worried about tracking
honestly there's no real point, many people have done so already. but i personally don't like the privacy policy, and the fact i would have to agree to firebase & crashlytics to use the app (i'm actually pro opt-out telemetry; but not un-opt-able and not via google). and sync is nice, but it's not that much nicer than thunder