Wow, these are really great updates! I especially like the improved UX around sign up and opening links on servers other than our native one.

Hear, hear, brother.

…king?

I see, makes sense. So if I get it correctly, the idea is to make it easier for new people to join the fediverse, and not so much to improve the experience for those of us already here (although it seems that is also a goal).

But why is that such a great benefit? We already have a myriad accounts for different services/platforms; would this be merely a marginal improvement over the current situation?

Damn, that seems to be flagrantly anti-competitive. Has Microsoft attempted to justify why they do that?

You can download an apk from the releases page.

Username checks out ^(sorry for the redditism 🙈)

there’s no way to activate pro right now, and afaik that option is not coming.

Since beta 25 it is now possible (and the developer had mentioned before that it was coming).

Edit: I stand corrected (should have read your comment more attentively), what’s available is, as you say, the option to remove ads with a one-time payment, as well as the sync ultra subscription. I’m not sure how the ad removal option is different from the pro mode in sync for reddit, though.

While more smarts in natural language understanding would be welcome, I don’t feel like that’s what the assistant is missing the most. The biggest advantage that google assistant has is the potential for tight integration with the system (Android). IMHO it would pay off to make it more capable in terms of interacting with existing apps, setting up flows of actions, etc., than necessarily making it be able to communicate more fluently.

And with a file browser sidebar 🤦