After 7 years of increasing piracy, review spam, and shifting requirements, a notable productivity app calls it quits on Android.

Guessing they don’t pray. Star Wars reference aside, learning about rampant Android piracy really made be rethink the pay devs receive for their effort. Per Business of Apps:

  • Consumers spent $47 billion on Google Play apps and games in 2023
  • Over 113 billion apps and games were downloaded on Google Play last year
  • 2.61 billion apps and games are available to download on Google Play
  • The top grossing app on Google Play in 2023 was Google One, a cloud storage service Instagram was the most downloaded app on Google Play last year, with 521 million downloads

The rest of the report is paywalled, so the number I was curious about – MAUs (ideally DAUs, but that’s a lot of time in Calc) for paid apps with at most 10,000 downloads – is probably out there, but it’s a Beehaw post. That report was the only result on DDG’s first page relevant to the query “google play store apps by downloads.”

All this to say, Apple’s 30% and, well, walled garden that covers piracy to a sufficient extent is starting to look like the better choice for my next phone. And I have been an ardent avoider of Apple products since college.

I buil(t) my rigs, with every component suited to my needs (or budget; YMMV – winning an i7-8086K gave me a lot of breathing room on the GPU side), but my life on a 24VDC electrical system has convinced me that a laptop need to replace my rig, and Apple seems to have my needed “lots of power with incredible battery life” nailed. But I now have to pick a final product that I didn’t build and thus have no idea how to troubleshoot a hardware problem.

Except, I’m a light gamer, building factories and such. Being on ARM doesn’t work.

I don’t want to be in the iPhone-x86 crowd. Most things are doable, but hardly seamless. But giving up Factorio is a bridge too far.

I’m no longer seduced by Google’s lie that app makers are rolling in the dough when it’s actually slave wages supporting freeloaders. Sure, this is only one example, but as the issue is with Google policy, it’s likely representative. That’s why I wanted to see the figures.

Part of me thinks this rant could have also worked in Politics. 🤣

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
    13·
    2 months ago

    Well, while I don’t understand their stubbornness of supporting Google drive, (Google restricts it so much? Ok then just remove it and blame Google. Replace with Dropbox/WebDAV/ftp/whatever) IMHO they’re right about the piracy. Years ago I tried to be an app developer for Android and iOS and I personally experienced that iOS users are willing to pay for everything. The in-app purchase to remove ads on iOS was bought by many, while on Google play literally a single person got it. Maybe it can be simply that because iPhones are 5x more expensive than the average Android (in my country there are no carrier locking and no carrier discounts at all), then users are wealthy or they’re adult workers, while kids and students get the cheaper Android phones.

    I closed both dev accounts years ago and now I’m android user. As an user, I simply cannot imagine paying $5 on Android for a glorified text editor with all the free alternatives that are available. Maybe android users are cost conscious?

    This is the top 10 most sold apps in my country:

    1. Game Booster 4x Faster Pro (users tricked by deceptive ads)
    2. e-Connect (an app to manage a specific home security system)
    3. Threema
    4. Obd torque pro
    5. IPTV extreme pro (used by pirates that want to watch soccer)
    6. Peakfinder
    7. Metronet (an app graphically identical to e-connect but with a different icon and name)
    8. Analog Rolex Royal Watch face (with obvious trademark infringement but of course Google doesn’t care)
    9. Tasker
    10. Nova launcher prime

    Now, this is definitely alarming.

    A smartwatch watchface is the #8 most sold app in a country with 30 million android users???

    #2 and #7 have a combined download count of 20k! And are in the top 10???

    Peakfinder is the #6??? How many people in October are trekking so much that they need to know which mountain are watching???

    Tasker and nova launcher?? Yes I also bought those two apps but are for power users, the 1% of users.

  • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
    8·
    2 months ago

    Wow, I didn’t know there was so much piracy on Android. At least much more so than on desktop computers (or Windows specifically I guess). Enough to make a dev stop even, not just the usual “oh no a few people are pirating our software that would otherwise not have bought it anyway”. I assumed it would be a relatively small percentage of more experienced users.

    By mid-September, the iA team claimed to have spent five months making 55 updates to its app and privacy policy and was ready to scan its passports and verify its payment accounts.

    Google then requested a CASA Tier 2 assessment. This needed to be done annually, either through an intensive self-directed process or through a corporate partner, like TAC Security or KPMG. By iA’s estimation, the labor and fees to do this would cost “one to two months of revenue” for "a pretty much meaningless scan,” iA suggested in its post.

    This is just absolutely crazy. I feel like Google absolutely had it out for them because why would they make them go through this arduous bullshit process for what seems to be described as a text editor app here.

    But giving up Factorio is a bridge too far.

    Factorio has an ARM port, it runs great on my M2 MacBook. But even if it didn’t, Rosetta works well enough so that x86-only games are playable.

  • ravhall
    6·
    2 months ago

    You didn’t see google was the devil like 15 years ago and stop using every google product? Honestly, I forget they’re still in business sometimes.

    • JaymesRS@literature.cafeEnglish
      7·
      2 months ago

      They usually remind me they’re in business once a year when I see people online complaining about them killing off something else that was incredibly useful but that Google just got bored with.

      • ravhall
        7·
        2 months ago

        Right? They kill so much. People should just go through their cemetery and revive different things. Some of them were good ideas, just poorly marketed.

  • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    This isn’t surprising to me, especially with how much Android dominates worldwide. It took me an hour or two to figure out how to pirate apps on Android when I got my first phone in high school. Their app store was full of scammy garbage so I pretty much never went there, it was far easier to download an apk from the web and install it.

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    3·
    2 months ago

    I can tell this is fake news just from the headline and photo.

    Everybody knows that Jabba (not Darth!) put Hans in carbonite.

      • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        It is, the headline mentions Vader but the featured image on the article (as well as the source) is Han in carbonite

        • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
          2·
          2 months ago

          Yes, Vader is literally the person who froze Han in carbonite, to test the process to make sure it would be safe for Luke. He then gave Han to Boba Fett to turn in for Jabba’s bounty.

          I don’t think the picture is anyone getting confused about who Darth Vader is.

          • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            Oops you’re right, I thought you meant the “fake news” part 😆

  • B0rax@feddit.org
    3·
    2 months ago

    Regarding your gaming point. Look up „game porting toolkit“ it is a native tool from Apple which lets you play most windows games on an ARM machine seamlessly.

  • 𝚝𝚛𝚔@aussie.zoneEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I’m sure they’re making all sorts of valid points, but it seems like all they had was a notes app that supports markdown? There’s about a billion free versions of them on the Play store.