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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

Xprivacy basically did this. I supported the developer by buying the "pro" version and he promptly stopped maintaining it...and started a new project that was substantially more complicated/difficult to use, requiring writing blocking rules by hand...or paying him for the "pro" service that included 'recipes' for blocks.

Which users of the old app didn't get.

Fuck you, Marcel Bokhorst.

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I do not know about this specific case and I have not used XPrivacy but I want to chime in here and say

Thank you, Marcel Bokhorst

Your NetGuard (https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard) and FairEmail (https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail) apps are great. They are high quality, open source and contain none of the dark patterns that mobile is plagued with. They are available to download from Github, F-Droid and the Playstore. There are paid premium features to support you but if I wanted to I could still compile the app myself to unlock them.

Wow, this seems like overly harsh feedback for stopping maintenance work on a project.

It's harsh, but not really about the maintenance being stopped, KennyBlanken paid for a pro version and the author changed commercial strategy and rebooted the project with a different approach, without granting a licence of the replacement to his existing customer. This is not respectful of paying customers.

Vendors stop giving system upgrades for their $1000 phones after 2 years and some people are complaining about their $2 one-time software license no longer working. What a sad world...

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