I'm very discouraged when I click their Blog page and see headlines like "Our best apps are now paid" and "Trial period." These apps have popups asking for support, which 100% are advertisements contrary to the thread title. Their apps which previously were free and received updates no longer get those updates and have been replaced with paid ones. This is a warning sign of enshittification and degradation of reliability. There are a multitude of ways they could someday stop updates to these apps too to replace them with another monetization scheme.
Having to put food on the table, plus the shitty business model (or lack thereof) of open source, means that it is probably either charging or not having the apps at all. The author has written code and released it under liberal licenses for years, and now they want (or worse, need because their life conditions changed) some income from the effort.
> they could someday stop updates to these apps too to replace them with another monetization scheme
The code is still being written and kindly released under the terms of an open source license, so if that happens, I'd expect that sufficiently motivated people moved by strong needs or ideals would be able to fork it and keep using (and possibly even improving) them without issue, as the license explicitly allows for it.
You get the "Pro" apps from F-Droid, including the "ThankYou" App. I never got any nagging from them (and yes, I donated, but that did not have any technical consequences and is not necessary).
I want to recommend things everyone benefits from, not myself. Consequently, I don't want to support anything that doesn't trend the community toward my ideals.
For instance, the Mastodon project and mastodon.social are run by a non-profit. They have their own mastodon account which discusses updates, advertises merchandise to support them, and could ask for sponsors or donations if needed. Users can subscribe to their feed if they want, and support them should they need help, while users who don't want advertisements won't be affected. I'm confident in the stability of this model for them so I chose to make my Mastodon account on their instance so I can trust I won't have to transfer to another someday should one shut down.
I'm hoping the digital space evolves in this direction and that we approach a post-advertisement economy.
Otherwise, enshittification keeps ruining things and we can't rely on the long-term stability of anything. Just look at Google.
