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. 🤣

  • 2xsaiko
    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.