The developer of fairemail, an open-source e-mail client, removed all his applications from Google play and announced that he would stop developing them Fairemail is a popular free email client. It is privacy friendly. There is no limit to the email accounts that users can set in the application. It supports unified inbox, conversation thread, two-way synchronization, OpenPGP and so on.
At XDA developers yesterday, Marcel bokhorst, the developer of the application, announced a major adjustment to the project. According to the post, bokhorst removed all his apps from the Google play store and announced that he would stop supporting and maintaining them.
Earlier this week, bokhorst received a policy violation email from Google, saying that Google believed the fairemail application was spyware. The full statement has not yet been released, but bokhorst believes that Google may have misunderstood the use of Website Icons in the application. He resubmitted a new version of the application and removed the use of Website Icons.
Another reason bokhorst gave up the app is that he answers thousands of support questions every month, but the revenue of the app is not much, and he is unable to take measures against unfair comments in the play store.
He considered keeping the application on GitHub, but this would lead to the loss of 98% of the audience. The GitHub repository is still available but archived. Users can still download the latest version from the repository and install it on their devices. Unsupported applications will continue to run, but there will be no future updates. Eventually, these applications may stop working completely.
The application may be forked and another developer can take over the development of the application. It remains to be seen whether the app violates Google's policy.