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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I use the calendar one.

Since it went not free, the free version doesn't generate notifications or alerts anymore. I almost missed appointments or meetings because of this.

This is planned obsolescence at best. I seriously despise everything about this.

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You only have to pay if you want to get it from the Play Store. They make the pro version available for free on F-Droid.

... This is obviously not about the money. Everyone here can easily afford to buy the pro version off the Play Store. The issue is about them pushing people to pay by removing features AFTER they already invested their time, data, and habit into the app.

That's odd. I got the calendar app off of f-droid and it works just fine for me.

Use the older version you liked then? I somehow feel a sense of entitlement here. Changing a pricing model for new releases has nothing to do with planned obsolescence; planned obsolescence is making something bad so that you have to buy it new sooner. You got it free. The whole concept also isn't a software thing: one can limit a license duration but software doesn't wear and break prematurely. A date-based kill switch might be the closest thing and that's not what happened here.

When software auto updates that’s effectively what happened here.

There's no downgrade option on Google Play Store?

Nope.

Oh :| Then I guess all I can recommend is f-droid where there is such an option (and also the issue wouldn't have manifested in the first place but that'd likely be different if f-droid were more popular)

There’s no such option on the store.

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