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

3 points by hidden-spyder ↗ HN
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?

3 comments

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daqnal
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
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
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.