Please don't do it like this.

It wasn't a bug. Please, just say it. Give me closure. It'll be good for your karma. The adverts have been running all month and the 1* reviews on the app store and your forums would have made you aware of this 'defect'. Forum responses were initially to tell us to upgrade - and then they went silent. I presume you had some internal meetings.

Resolving this wouldn't have been hard, as due to it being open-sourced, we can see there's a debug flag to turn the adverts on and off: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/podcasts-you-altered-the-de...

The Verge story came out on the 24th, and on the 25th suddenly the adverts vanished (on both beta and production channels simultaneously). Imagine me raising my eyebrow.

Unlike some of my fellow previously-paid users, I'd said I was OK with paying you more money. The app's lasted longer than most, I've used it nearly every day, and I want to make sure the maintainers get paid and you can keep the lights on. I think it's still the only app where I've raised a ticket to ask how to donate more money.

What's sent us all the the barricades though, is the tone-deaf way this was done - and it's continuing to happen. The adverts are gone, but I'm not feeling happy. This feels like remission at best. I'm suspecting you're not feeling deliriously cheerful over what the last month has achieved either.

My constructive thoughts are: 1) £40 is too much to pay each year for a podcast app. Nothing will work at this price. Look at Antennapod and justify anything you're charging for - it's what any your new users will be doing. 2) For people who paid to turn off the adverts forever, they need to have a way to have their adverts turned off turned off - so they'll need to be differentiated from the new users. 3) This doesn't mean I (and I assume others) don't want to pay you money though. Give me a way. Maybe every month, or 1000 minutes of playback just pop-up a "I hope your enjoying us, have you got a spare $10" message"? And if I click the little X, that message should instantly vanish/snooze. Annoyingly, this might have worked better before you'd torched the goodwill.