Ok, yeah, upon reflection I think I agree with you.

But a subscription to remove ads? Your app doesn’t need an external server to do that.

This is kind of a bad example because the value proposition is different but still very clear - the default version of the app provides a regular income stream to the developers. If you don’t like that, you can choose to provide an alternative income stream instead.

It is still unfair because the subscription cost is usually many times more than what the ads will earn for a single user - but it’s a matter of quantity at that point, not quality.

The Adobe case is still a much better example, IMO. Yes, they may offer regular content updates worth subscribing for, but their products could still work perfectly well as one-time purchases without access to the content stream. The only reason they didn’t is that they don’t have enough competition to be worried about customers moving away.

If the app doesn’t have network access, though, the OS sandbox should be more than sufficient to keep it secure.

A calculator app should be safe to run without updates at least until the OS APIs undergo a breaking changes (which should take several years at least).

Then you’re paying for your user account with the cloud services, not the client apps (which you may not even use, e.g. if there is a Web version or a third party client).

A subtle distinction, I know, but it matters.

Are you running the container in rootless mode (perhaps via Podman)?

Rootless containers run on an emulated network stack (slirp4netns for podman, not sure about rootless docker), since the runtime doesn’t have the privilege to touch the real one - which is the point of running rootless.

This emulation uses a decent amount of memory and torrent clients in particular open a lot of connections. My slirp4netns process eats up several gigabytes whenever the torrent container is active.

Spotube.

Note that it’s not really a Spotify streaming app, rather it uses your (free) Spotify account for playlists, search, recommendations, etc. and then goes and find the song you want to play on YouTube, and the lyrics from scraping websites I think. Pretty clever.

Email blocklists are based on spam and malware.

I’ve never heard of an email operator refusing to send or deliver SMTP messages to/from a certain provider because too many of its users support the wrong political party.

You don’t need insync - most people just automate rclone sync commands using whatever task scheduler their system runs by default (cronjobs or systemd units, typically). For those who prefer a GUI, KDE has a Scheduled Tasks app.

On Android, you can use Round Sync which is a wrapper around rclone and can import the same configs.