I was never a fan of the first version of this app, despite being a mobile app developer and a photography nerd. I paid for and tried the initial version (Mark I?) a year or two ago, and, aside from a few manual settings and RAW capture it didn't do a whole lot beyond what the stock photo app did, and Halide's UI was a bit worse to boot. But whatever.

Now I re-download Halide (the version I paid for a year or two ago) to see what this new version is all about and I'm presented with a bewildering splash screen, prompting me to subscribe (for what now?) and I do everything I can to not subscribe, and then I'm taken to the permissions screen, and it's asking for camera permissions (totally reasonable), photo library access (ok, but let's hold on for a sec), and location access (no thank you), and I can't get anywhere in the app that I paid for, without granting all three permissions.

Having location access a hard requirement for a photo app is just ridiculous. What product owner made this decision? IMO it's completely out of touch and user hostile.

Edit: turns out the hard constraint was access to the photo library. Which, how was I to know that? The UI seemed to indicate that I couldn't proceed until all the boxes were checked.

Look, I get that this is a specialized app and I understand the complexity and nuance related to app permissions. Which means the app developer has to be super clear about what the requirements are from the start.