Plenty of reasons.

• System wide adblock
• Advanced permission management
• Backups and exports of system apps
• Full uninstall of bloatware (instead of mere hiding them with adb)
• Enabling screenshots system-wide

And a bunch of other stuff I need in order to have a fully functioning device.

SEO is spamming a link to your stupid blog all over Lemmy, apparently.

Astrill, only VPN with a good track record in China where I happen to live.

Most others crap out after a few weeks or months, and never bother to fix their protocols.

A mix of avira and malwarebytes locally, and virustotal if I'm especially sceptical.

Exactly. And lifetime is just about 100 bucks, who cares. Sure it sounds like more than the casual $2 you throw at a random app to remove ads, but considering that I used Sync daily for ~12 years, it's really just peanuts in the long run.

I've bought a bunch of seemingly cheaper apps and then used them 10 times over 2 years and they ended up discontinued, that's like 20 cents per use.

I'd have racked up tens of thousands with Sync that way. Easily the most used app on my phone.

If it's open source, the developer can't monetize it. Everyone will just be able to remove ads and compile it from scratch.

FOSS is all fine and dandy, unless being a developer for a popular service (or app) is your sole source of income.

The actual blockers were fixed in the first couple days, if not hours. We are now at beta 23 within just 10 days since the internal testing began, lj has been working like a madman.

14 years primary account, 11 years alt. Mod in several >1 million communities.

Deleted everything, replaced my comments (>15k total) and posts (>500, including announcements on subs moderated) with a message stating my reasons, and then deleted both accounts. Plus 4 alts I sparsely used, between 3-8 years old.

Those poor trees.

IMHO whenever you actively need something and the owner either doesn't make it available or the price is prohibitively expensive, it's justified. That especially includes papers, books and other tuition material that's been paywalled or made expensive as hell without any actual reason, even more so if the author gets next to no compensation.

Downloading series and movies that aren't being streamed anymore, by all means.

When it comes to current movies, it depends on what's available. Unfortunately most streaming platforms don't have Chinese subtitles, and my wife often struggles to fully follow the original audio and the English subs often disappear too quickly.

For software, my personal stance is that if you use something every once in a while, pirate away. If you use it regularly and/or generate income from it, then pay your dues.

Ich hab keine Ahnung wer JO überhaupt ist, aber alles ist besser als einzuknicken.

*billion

And profitability is not the same as generating revenue.

You can earn $200M a quarter and still have expenses of $220M, meaning you're making a net loss.

That's why companies focus on exponential growth first and don't really care about portability, but once the userbase is large enough, they will try to monetize it. Either through ads, or paid subscriptions, premium plans, special avatars, etc.

That will surely piss of some of the early adopters, but usually isn't significant enough to make an actual dent.

The last step (which we have also seen) is then kicking out staff. That has two effects:

1., It brings down the overhead (= salaries and attached taxes & social security) 2. The revenue per capita is inflated, i.e. it looks as if every employee is generating 4000 bucks instead of 2500 (random example), which is something that looks good in an IPO prospectus.