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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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 This made developing updates profitable and people who didn't care to pay for the update could still use the outdated program.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.
Yeah it's not the perfect model for sure. Usually you did get updates to fix vulnerabilities and bugs, but any major version release would require a new purchase/license.
But any software that requires connecting to a server anywhere just doesn't work in this model.
In the end there's not much of a choice. Either you pay more for apps to compensate for the time spent on them, subscribe to reduce your costs and assure continuous revenue, or ads.
Anything that's perpetually free, unless it has massive communities willing to maintain it, typically ends up like the tools we see here: abandoned/sold.
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.