It worked for years with no/few changes. Then the price increases and pro features stop working.
I'm not too likely to give the devs the benefit of the doubt. Patch out the 'pro' check and release an update. Or reply to one of the many new 1 star reviews and say you lost access to the source code, if that's what happened.
They seem to have pulled it, I can't find it on my Pixel.
I paid for it in 2014, and it hasn't been updated in about half of that time, they removed the cloud key backup at some point without notification so I lost all of the keys I had stored, and last time I used it, it didn't even recognise I had paid for it.
I still don’t get it. You say it yourself that it worked for years with no issues. Current behavior is bad but the community pirating the app does not seem right either.
Popular apps get away with more user hostility and price gouging. To me this effort seems misplaced.
I know, my point is this doesn’t give you the right to pirate the app. You have legal ways to fight it: request a refund, report it to the store, write a review, advocate for an open source alternative, etc.
People have shared that many of those things didn't work, developers don't care about reviews of an abandoned app, refund process probably costs you more in time than you would get, and Google is not really known for their good support.
You shouldn't go through that much effort for something you already paid and obviously malicious/unethical approach caused you problems. If there are things in favour of piracy, it is in cases like this.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. At the same time piracy in this case feels short sighted to me.
If the community supported the dev, then both might get what they want, i.e. a maintained app and some income. With negative reviews a cheaper competitor might appear due to demand. But with piracy the app is even more likely to get abandoned and no alternative will show up either.
Then again if the ecosystem is indeed that bad, perhaps this is the way to torch it even more. Still, google plans to block sideloading and then I guess we’re at their mercy.
Do you consider it piracy when the user paid for a lifetime license, which then quits working, so the user modifies the app to keep the feature working?
Complete silence + taking money...