I’ve gotten a lot of use out of Android text editors over the years. I usually do final drafts in TiddlyWiki (that’s where they’ll be stored after posting anyway, and after this many years I’m just comfortable writing in TW markup), and I’ll often do a bullet-point rough draft on a piece of receipt paper or something, but in between, when I’m not in front of my computer and want to build on or polish something…

And for the last four years or so, my go-to text editor was Moon Writer. I liked its interface, its reliability, its willingness to save outside of the Downloads folder. It also had Markdown compatibility, in case I ever got around to familiarizing myself with a second markup language.

And I especially liked its honest business model: it was free, but it had a “pro key” that unlocked some advanced formatting and let me give the dev a couple bucks. That’s how I know I’ve been using Moon Writer for four years: according to Google Play, I bought that pro key in 2022.

So when the dev put out what he labeled as a “technical update,” I started it before reading the changelog for once. It didn’t immediately occur to me not to trust him.

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed my use of the past tense, and that the link is to a Wayback page.

 

I opened the app shortly after the update and was prompted to give it access to my folders… which it already had. OK, I guess, but the interface also looked different…

…and then it prompted me to log in with an email and password.

What?

So I checked the changelog, which was now in Russian. Online translators exist, so I could read about “the migration to the new cloud architecture” –

What the fuck? It’s a text editor for local files. What cloud architecture?

I backed up my text files to a different folder, just in case, and started researching.

…according to the new terms and conditions – via Google Translate, because they too were in Russian – the dev wanted another payment of about $8 (599 rubles) through some payment network I hadn’t heard of before called Robokassa. I have bought apps more than once, but I very much didn’t like it being demanded of me like that.

I also didn’t like how the dev gave himself permission to terminate users’ access with 30 days’ notice, said notice probably also being on a website written in Russian. He said he’d try to enable offline access first, in an app that had previously been nothing but offline, but made no promises.

And I didn’t like that what little I’d seen of the UI looked so unfamiliar. How much had the rest of the app changed?

 

I’m calling the dev “he” because the name on the terms and conditions website is male. It also came back in search as the name of a chemist. Maybe app development is his side hustle, or maybe it’s an alias; I’m not sure what Russian law has to say about microbusiness pseudonymity.

I’m also not entirely sure that he’s the same guy as before; maybe he hacked a better, more trustworthy dev’s Google account and replaced the old app with this shit in hopes of a quick buck…

 

Guess what I didn’t spend 599 rubles on.

I couldn’t have easily, anyway; based on the tantrum my bank threw when I tried to buy a game from GOG, I assume they would have called the FBI on me if I tried sending money to some rando through Robokassa. I also assume that workarounds exist, but nothing about this new app or its new terms inspired me to make the effort.

At time of writing, I’ve about 90% settled on a replacement text editor. It has its quirks, like sometimes needing to be closed and reopened before word wrap will work, but it annoys me less than the other editors I tried out; I still have two of those installed, in case I change my mind.

One of those text editors was paid for up front, and the other two are FOSS. My long-standing hatred of bullshit mobile business models has only grown…