After the app rating was down to about 2.8 stars on Google Play Store recently, it is now at 4.1 stars. Latest ratings seem to be from September 2022 though.
Looks like they've deleted all the 1-star ratings that had been recently added.
Anyone tried review bombing with 5 star reviews and scathing comments to see if their system kicks in to remove all fake 5 star reviews in the last x hours? Or is this a manual removal of reviews they do?
It seems to me like it's the US which is severely lacking in customer protections, allowing the Playstore to make deals with Reddit to fudge the ratings.
One of the reasons I am still actively trying to DeGoogle all my shit.
If you want to make some similar changes here are some suggestions:
YouTube : PeerTube
Chrome : FireFox with "Hardened Profile" or another browser like LibreWolf (also try to setup uBlock that blocks javascript/3rd party apps by default)
Windows : Linux Mint
Gmail : ProtonMail
Built in Password Manager : Locally Stored Password Manager
I get not all of them are directly Google but this will help block out a lot of the tracking that they do even if you aren't logged into their website.
Peertube is quite bad. I would suggest using Newpipe until it improves, because switching over to Peertube from YouTube means you won't find almost any content anymore.
That means people will switch back to YouTube. So using Newpipe is better I believe. Even though it would be great if everyone started uploading to peertube instead. But people who make videos on YouTube seem to be doing it for the money, so not likely they will enjoy Peertube.
I love it. My only gripes are the inside screen not continuing on the outside when you close it, but that could be changed with android 14 or another update. And it does get a decently warm sometimes.