Devs/support get overwhelmed, apps get buggy. A better course of action to me seems: reporting a broken app, requesting refund, waiting for the fix and switching to an alternative in the meantime.
I also dislike that this behavior could be a reason against sideloading, especially if made more popular.
Complete silence + taking money...
Popular apps get away with more user hostility and price gouging. To me this effort seems misplaced.
Feature people PAID!!!! for suddenly stopped working.
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.
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.
I don't, since it was a lifetime license.
Does patching out the license check not, in this case, fall under the "interoperability" or "abandonware" clauses of the DMCA?
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 moved to a different app a while back.