As someone who paid the $5-10 in 2014 for the same app, I think I would've just preferred it no longer updating, to be honest. When NPR bought the app, they spent the next year adding a number of features I never used (a few of which made the app function worse for my particular usage pattern, and many of which I imagine substantially increased their server costs), and pushed a number of UI redesigns that were less to my personal taste.

I don't personally have the "righteous fury" of the article's author (I'm more just annoyed and disappointed that a nice thing I liked is now noticeably less nice, for complex social and economic reasons outside any one person's control), but I can certainly understand why a person would be mad enough to fork a repo and write a couple hundred words in a blog post.