My reply to all the naysayers:

Thanks for making Lemmy feel like home, it wouldn’t without you!

The reality is it’s a free world, regardless of what morality you put on things there are going to be things that happen that you don’t like. That’s life.

Like it or not Lemmy has had explosive growth because of apps like Sync. Because of them being killed off by Reddit. If it weren’t for the drama of Reddit doing that, I and millions of other users wouldn’t be here right now as we’d still be on Reddit.

Even people who weren’t using the 3rd party apps left Reddit because Reddit’s actions left a bad taste in their mouths.

So, morality of one guy charging for his honest work in creating the paid or ad supported app aside, you should be thanking the apps including sync for helping drive so many users to Lemmy.

If you yourself don’t want to use a paid app, then that’s okay! We’re all allowed to respond or react to things how we want, but being incredibly divisive for something that a lot of people wanted and that really is inconsequential is almost universally frowned on.

Just let people do what they want and don’t shoot them down for it. More options for browsing Lemmy = more Lemmings = more content.

Much love my dudes! We may disagree on this but we agree on many many many more things I’m sure, just because we’re on Lemmy instead of Reddit in the first place is proof of that! ✌️

I didn’t use Sync with reddit but since it’s the best one for Lemmy… Here I am! On Sync! Enjoying it!

As a software engineer I find it miraculous the amount of people that whine about somebody wanting to get paid for putting weeks, months, and years of their life into a product 100s of thousands of people CHOOSE to use.

I’m absolutely thrilled to have sync on the Fediverse, and will happily pay for a yearly subscription to help ensure LJD has sufficient compensation to keep the app up-to-date with whatever changes come to the Android/Lemmy APIs years down the road.

The problem with (even excellent) free apps for platforms like this, is they require consistent maintenance to keep up with both the platform they run on (Android), and the platform they serve content for (Lemmy). That is not a trivial amount of work, and is absolutely deserving of continued, recurring compensation IMO.

A one-time payment might make sense for a simple native game that gets produced once, has no web component, and never needs another update for its entire lifetime, but not for this. You aren’t paying for a singular product, you’re paying for a service. You wouldn’t go to the barber and winged about needing to pay every time I get my hair cut.

People care too much about which app you use. At the end of the day, as long as you’re happy with sync it shouldn’t matter