Just yesterday GPSLogger has again been unpublished from the Play Store (for the nth time, as usual without warning). Play Store removals are tricky business; I often don't see much reason given except vague statements and links to policy documents, and therefore these situations often require a lot of guessing, rework and resubmitting. These events are a highly stressful time as it's a race to quickly fix things and get the app back on the store.
In the past I've spent effort in getting the app reinstated, however I can't do that any longer; I no longer have the motivation and energy to support GPSLogger development and to deal with the Play Store's moving goalposts. My attention has been focused elsewhere over the past year, and this is evident by my slow replies lack of attention to issues and emails (sorry!). More importantly I am not willing to endure the stress that these store removals cause me.
The core of the issue (why it gets removed) has been that GPSLogger supports a lot of older devices and frameworks, whereas the Play Store is always trying to get everyone onto the latest versions. It's not obvious from here but a majority of GPSLogger users are on older devices. This has led to a lot of complexity in the codebase and inevitably (and expectedly) made it difficult to support and maintain while keeping up with the latest Play Store requirements and user feature requests and PRs and issues, and giving them the attention they deserve.
I'll keep trying to answer some Github issues and direct emails when I can, but still at a slow pace.
The latest APK is still available in releases section but will now require sideloading. It's under the 'Assets' link.
I've also now put the app on F-Droid.
Future options are unknown, I've been trying to mull these over... I don't want to hand the development, account and app over to potential future maintainers; in the unlikely event of someone else wanting to fork and republish, I'd rather the fork get republished with a different name. I say unlikely event, because as mentioned before, the codebase is complex and it might be easier for someone new to just start over. If the motivation and energy ever return I could consider moving to normal F-Droid (proper), which will require stripping out GDrive, Dropbox and a few other proprietary features.
tl;dr - Removed from Play Store, reason unknown. Low energy, high stress. Development on hold. APK is in releases or on F-Droid.
Just yesterday GPSLogger has again been unpublished from the Play Store (for the nth time, as usual without warning). Play Store removals are tricky business; I often don't see much reason given except vague statements and links to policy documents, and therefore these situations often require a lot of guessing, rework and resubmitting. These events are a highly stressful time as it's a race to quickly fix things and get the app back on the store.
In the past I've spent effort in getting the app reinstated, however I can't do that any longer; I no longer have the motivation and energy to support GPSLogger development and to deal with the Play Store's moving goalposts. My attention has been focused elsewhere over the past year, and this is evident by my slow replies lack of attention to issues and emails (sorry!). More importantly I am not willing to endure the stress that these store removals cause me.
The core of the issue (why it gets removed) has been that GPSLogger supports a lot of older devices and frameworks, whereas the Play Store is always trying to get everyone onto the latest versions. It's not obvious from here but a majority of GPSLogger users are on older devices. This has led to a lot of complexity in the codebase and inevitably (and expectedly) made it difficult to support and maintain while keeping up with the latest Play Store requirements and user feature requests and PRs and issues, and giving them the attention they deserve.
I'll keep trying to answer some Github issues and direct emails when I can, but still at a slow pace.
The latest APK is still available in releases section but will now require sideloading. It's under the 'Assets' link.
I've also now put the app on F-Droid.
Future options are unknown, I've been trying to mull these over... I don't want to hand the development, account and app over to potential future maintainers; in the unlikely event of someone else wanting to fork and republish, I'd rather the fork get republished with a different name. I say unlikely event, because as mentioned before, the codebase is complex and it might be easier for someone new to just start over. If the motivation and energy ever return I could consider moving to normal F-Droid (proper), which will require stripping out GDrive, Dropbox and a few other proprietary features.
tl;dr - Removed from Play Store, reason unknown. Low energy, high stress. Development on hold. APK is in releases or on F-Droid.