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Comment by yu_ni | Hacker News Reader

The developer relies on the income from Goolge Play Store to keep working on it though:

"I understand that most of my audience here on Mastodon is more ideology aligned with F-Droid but the app sales on Google Play store have contributed significantly to me working (almost) full time on #Conversations_im.

Without the revenue from Google Play I can’t afford this." -- https://gultsch.social/@daniel/111929678072451151

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Pretty surprising that you can make money off of a free software app like this, I always thought almost nobody would actually pay for it on Google Play store.

I hope he can work it out with Google. Conversations is the best Android XMPP client I know of.

I'm using a fork but it is the best XMPP client out there. Even the ones on Linux are riddled with bugs and usability issues.

I heavily use Gajim and it works very well on Linux. I couldn't recall any problems I had recently.

Gajim, at least in Windows, has terrible to nonexistent support for (video) calls.

Indeed, I don't really do video calls. For audio calls I use my phone, since I can move around. Maybe the web client https://mov.im/ can do video calls on Windows?

Even on iOS, none of them have UI as good as Conversations' (Android).

I was using XMPP only for some notifications (through a small bot) and it was nice while on Android. But when I moved to iOS I just stopped using XMPP because I didn't want to use any of the available clients.

Kindly allow me to reply with profanity [1] to that statement. :-)

[1] https://profanity-im.github.io

I’m using the F-Droid version, but I bought it on Play.

The best method is to install the F-Droid version and donate directly to the developer. Google takes a 30% cut on Play purchases. In the case of Conversations, Daniel has an account on Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/iNPUTmice/

This definitely helps the developer but as they said (https://gultsch.social/@daniel/111930342452832163) they much prefer having Conversations being available to non-techy people than relying on the hardcore fans

oof that hurts more than the app removal, it also took away most of his income. Surely he can find a human being somewhere that can help appeal it? No HN googlers with contacts?

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