Ask HN: Why was Materialistic (HN client) removed from Play Store?

3 points by hidden-spyder 3 years ago | 3 comments

I can no longer find it in Play Store. Even the link provided in its official repo fails to load. There are no mentions of it being removed, so is it just me?

daqnal 3 years ago |

I believe it is because their app was not updated in 2 years, and was auto delisted from Google Play. https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic/issues/1464

It is still up on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.hidroh.materialist...

hidden-spyder 3 years ago | |

Thanks! I didn't think about searching on fdroid.

Why does Google do this? Now I wonder what good apps I can't find due to them not being updated.

daqnal 3 years ago | | |

My guess is probably both to free space from their servers and to ensure that unknowing users aren't downloading an app that doesn't have somewhat recent security patches.