Apps disappearing from my android phone

Ike Pro was the first app that I bought with my own money from android play store. It was a to-do list app which introduced me to Eisenhower Matrix. This has been my favourite way to prioritise tasks ever since. Coming from a Linux / OSS environment (and being naive and young), paying for an app was way too new to me. But the price was justified and the quality of the app was good.

I used it for a long time. And after a while, even though I wasn’t using it a lot anymore, I still used to come back to it. And after a long gap, I decided to start using the app regularly again. I knew I have it installed on my phone. So, I searched for it only to find that it’s not on my phone anymore. The last time I used it was on my 3rd phone since I bought the app. Searching on the play store made me realise that it wasn’t listed anymore. Given that I knew it wasn’t updated in a long time, I thought OK, maybe I uninstalled it. Cos I regularly cleanup my phone’s files and apps. But I didn’t find any app good enough like Ike. Not even now, when Eisenhower matrix based apps are finally picking up steam.

The same thing happened again today morning. But this time, it was Aegis - the TOTP authenticator. A far more serious issue. The app was v2.x which cannot be upgraded to v3.x because of some compatibility issue. While I had migrated most of my 2FA codes to another app, I didn’t do the same for some rarely used app logins. I don’t remember why. While it is true that it was my mistake to not update the app for so long, I can’t stress enough that the app was working perfetcly fine. It was an offline only app. For now, I can search my phone and it opens my app info page for Aegis. From here, I can open the app. But I don’t know how long that will work. And I am not sure if google will delete it like they did for Ike. Or did they? I really don’t know. But I will keep a close eye this time.

android’s google problem

The never ending cycle of developers having to update the app for googles api changes have killed solo devs like Ike. Only apps left are the big tech, VC funded or scammy spywares. Excuse is always security. But the fact that we cannot keep enough backward compatibility anymore saddens me. Or the fact that we are unable to make reliable app which doesn’t need to be updated regularly. Especially the offline-only apps which can eventually be considered finished. Not to mention the random policies that can make a perfectly fine app disappear from your phone.

If Jenny Spurlock and Long Ma, the creators of Ike to-do are reading this - thank you! I bought the app in 2016. And I still remember it after almost a decade.