I just got called a brat on #Tumblr because I pointed out that #SimplyPlural was handled poorly. Like, the person's arguments was that it was a passion project, the dev couldn't afford to hire anyone, and that they don't owe anyone happiness. This is bullsh!t for multiple reasons.

For one, Apparyllis formed a company for this in 2021 and had a paying customer base. It kinda stops being just a passion project when you literally have users paying for your service. They had donations, a Patreon, a subscription service, and backing from organizations like The Plural Association.

Secondly, I heard they couldn't do volunteers because they legally are not allowed to handle user data. There's multiple points to this. For one, what data was Simply Plural storing where they couldn't have volunteers touch user data? Why was that data being stored unencrypted? Additionally, why couldn't volunteers just handle tasks that didn't require touching that data?

Then there's the fact that despite 500,000 users, and all the income streams I mentioned, they somehow were only breaking even. Even if only 1% of users donated a dollar a month, that's still 60,000$ a year. How much data were they storing for costs to be that high??? You'd think they were storing games or video, not text data and profile pictures. It was only one dev who wasn't even working full-time, so they didn't have to dish out paychecks, so the only money sink could've been server costs. Like, excuse me for being skeptical that an app with all those income streams and a single dev somehow consumes 5 figures a month for an app like this.

Thirdly, sure, the dev has the right to close the app down whenever, but if they didn't want to handle such a major responsibility, they should've stopped it before it got to this point. Apparyllis had several years to realize that this app was becoming too much for them. Instead, they waited until they had 500,000 users and were completely burnt out on the project. It's the worst of both worlds. I'm glad they're refunding patrons and subscribers, though.

But yeah, this project just... was not handled well, and I don't think it's being a brat to criticize that. I feel like this whole situation was preventable, and we know it is because apps like #Pluralkit are able to exist, be paid for, and have multiple developers.

I just hope whatever alternative crops up learns from Apparyllis's mistakes.

#Plurality #Plural #Critique #ActuallyPlural #Tulpamancy #App #LongPost