Yeah I agree re opaque policies as if someone can get suspended for this, it would be nice if it was easy to find a policy regarding it. Thanks for your response.

Can you or Laurence link me to the policy saying one can’t have both a paid and unpaid app? Or are you asserting Google didn’t follow their own policy in this regard?

Linking a message saying that someone was temporarily suspended doesn’t sway me especially when I see apps on the store that have both paid and free versions of their apps like the app I linked earlier. If they and others can do it, why can’t the dev for Sync?

Now if someone could share a link to a policy document by Google saying “You cannot have both a paid version and an unpaid version of an app on the play store” then I would be very happy to be corrected here and I will happily adapt my stance to support that. (Seriously, I don’t mind being corrected – I’d just prefer something official from Google.)

And so it’s a deal breaker for me. And while I never used Sync for Reddit, I am thankful to all the app creators for helping the community often out of pocket and/or while being severely underpaid for years. And I hope this dev will do well financially with other users who have loyalty or different priorities than I concerning privacy and transparency.

I appreciate your response and I agree. And likewise nothing wrong with the dev making money and fans supporting that too. (I’ve seen complaints of some people who think all Lemmy apps should be free…and I feel that’s very entitled demanding someone else’s time and effort for free, but they too can just use free apps.)

Sure and if the dev goes back on that we have no recourse to get a refund from Google or for Google to take any action towards the dev since the dev can just show we agreed to our data being collected/used regardless of whether we paid or not.

Cool. It’s great that you did this.

However, my concern is there are no guarantees it wouldn’t change and there would be no recourse for Google to give us a refund since from Google’s standpoint we gave permission for the app to track our data regardless of whether we paid or not.

Yeah I was going to try the app based on all they hype but I noped out based on the trackers and that you have to accept all those permissions regardless if you pay. A dev saying they won’t use the data of paid users – that isn’t the kind of thing I would expect to be enforceable when legally you’ve already signed permissions for the data to be collected/used.

Just because it was done like this before does not mean it’s a good or transparent practice. I can appreciate though that those who used and loved Sync for Reddit may not care.

I have not used Sync for Reddit however but upon hearing about how much people love it, I wanted to give this app a try. My main point is it’s not transparent unless their is a separate app for the paid version that lays out the permissions.

A post doesn’t matter to me if I legally agree for that data to be collected as a requirement for installing the app.

I didn’t find anything against having both a paid app and a free app in the Google’s Policy Center.

While you can’t have two apps called the same thing, e.g., both apps called ‘your app name’, you can have one app called ‘your app name’ and another app called ‘your app name pro’.

I found advice going back years saying one just needs to create a separate project like this. And here is the most recent source I found saying the same thing and it goes further and lists apps that are on the store with both paid and free versions. I also did my own search and found this example: My Lightning Tracker & Alerts is free and My Lightning Tracker Pro is a paid app.

And regardless the dev saying they won’t use the data from paid users – that doesn’t matter to me when legally by using the app I signed away permission for that data to be collected.