Well, while I don't understand their stubbornness of supporting Google drive, (Google restricts it so much? Ok then just remove it and blame Google. Replace with Dropbox/WebDAV/ftp/whatever) IMHO they're right about the piracy. Years ago I tried to be an app developer for Android and iOS and I personally experienced that iOS users are willing to pay for everything. The in-app purchase to remove ads on iOS was bought by many, while on Google play literally a single person got it. Maybe it can be simply that because iPhones are 5x more expensive than the average Android (in my country there are no carrier locking and no carrier discounts at all), then users are wealthy or they're adult workers, while kids and students get the cheaper Android phones.

I closed both dev accounts years ago and now I'm android user. As an user, I simply cannot imagine paying $5 on Android for a glorified text editor with all the free alternatives that are available. Maybe android users are cost conscious?

This is the top 10 most sold apps in my country:

1. Game Booster 4x Faster Pro (users tricked by deceptive ads)
2. e-Connect (an app to manage a specific home security system)
3. Threema
4. Obd torque pro
5. IPTV extreme pro (used by pirates that want to watch soccer)
6. Peakfinder
7. Metronet (an app graphically identical to e-connect but with a different icon and name)
8. Analog Rolex Royal Watch face (with obvious trademark infringement but of course Google doesn't care)
9. Tasker
10. Nova launcher prime

Now, this is definitely alarming.

A smartwatch watchface is the #8 most sold app in a country with 30 million android users?????

#2 and #7 have a combined download count of 20k! And are in the top 10?????

Peakfinder is the #6???? How many people in October are trekking so much that they need to know which mountain are watching???

Tasker and nova launcher?? Yes I also bought those two apps but are for power users, the 1% of users.

Wow, I didn't know there was so much piracy on Android. At least much more so than on desktop computers (or Windows specifically I guess). Enough to make a dev stop even, not just the usual "oh no a few people are pirating our software that would otherwise not have bought it anyway". I assumed it would be a relatively small percentage of more experienced users.

By mid-September, the iA team claimed to have spent five months making 55 updates to its app and privacy policy and was ready to scan its passports and verify its payment accounts.

Google then requested a CASA Tier 2 assessment. This needed to be done annually, either through an intensive self-directed process or through a corporate partner, like TAC Security or KPMG. By iA's estimation, the labor and fees to do this would cost "one to two months of revenue" for "a pretty much meaningless scan,” iA suggested in its post.

This is just absolutely crazy. I feel like Google absolutely had it out for them because why would they make them go through this arduous bullshit process for what seems to be described as a text editor app here.

But giving up Factorio is a bridge too far.

Factorio has an ARM port, it runs great on my M2 MacBook. But even if it didn't, Rosetta works well enough so that x86-only games are playable.

You didn’t see google was the devil like 15 years ago and stop using every google product? Honestly, I forget they’re still in business sometimes.

This isn’t surprising to me, especially with how much Android dominates worldwide. It took me an hour or two to figure out how to pirate apps on Android when I got my first phone in high school. Their app store was full of scammy garbage so I pretty much never went there, it was far easier to download an apk from the web and install it.

Regarding your gaming point. Look up „game porting toolkit“ it is a native tool from Apple which lets you play most windows games on an ARM machine seamlessly.

I can tell this is fake news just from the headline and photo.

Everybody knows that Jabba (not Darth!) put Hans in carbonite.

I'm sure they're making all sorts of valid points, but it seems like all they had was a notes app that supports markdown? There's about a billion free versions of them on the Play store.