Simple Mobile Tools is being sold to a for-profit firm ZipoApps
Simple Mobile apps have been very popular among FOSS enthusiasts. I've personally been using the Gallery, Contacts and the Phone app since a few years now. It's a shame that it has come to this, will be on the lookout for their forks.
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you know, I'd really love to get a good app that i pay for and that in turn doesn't collect or sell my data and has no ads, but there's so many but's.
just to say: I'm not sure there is a good solution where everyone wins :/
In ye old days the reigning model was a pseudo subscription where you paid for a version of a program and that's all you got, if you wanted the next version of that program you had to buy it again. This made developing updates profitable and people who didn't care to pay for the update could still use the outdated program. It wasn't perfect by any means but I feel like it was one of the better compromises compared to everything else.
Sadly with the advent of mobile apps such a model is heavily discouraged.
Well to be fair, for most software it was the major releases that were paid, and the minor ones were given free, on the understanding that these ~never contained functionality changes, additions or reworks.
So 3.1 was purely a bugfix for 3.0, for example. Hence you got it free. Often when 4.0 came out (which you had to pay to get) there's also a be a 3.2 update that served as the "final" rleease of that branch. Any bugs in it now are there to stay.
And yeah. Although, I feel in a way that's what we got here, no? If I paid for these I can turn updates off and use the version I bought, so to speak.
What could be more sustainable for the development is to make updates with new features paid. People have a one time payment for the app and then pay for new features.
It's absolutely ot perfect. But, it's not a subscription and the dev still earn something.
This would cause a maintenance nightmare for the devs though. And from what I hear, the app stores discourage multiple versions of the same app these days.