[rchaud]

Simple Mobile makes apps like file managers and image galleries. Just how much work is required to maintain this besides keeping the file access API up to date? Not sure if that's even had any breaking changes on Android in the past several years.

[juunpp]

This isn't win32 or posix. You'd be surprised how often Android breaks APIs for no fucking reason. It's a Google product, after all.

[dessant]

I'm not familiar with these projects, so I'm not sure how much time it would take to just keep them afloat, but I've seen they are popular and beloved apps. Looking at the GitHub activity, they have been actively developed for years, and several releases a year also contain new features. This was more than likely a full-time job for the developer.

It's regrettable that the funding model of these projects did not work out, and that the developer sold these apps without informing users about the change of ownership.

Though it feels like at this point we are bargaining for the amount of free work we are expected to get from this person, while sneering at the prospect of there being a paid version of the app published on Google Play as part of the original funding model that was in place long before the sale.