They mention customer support so many times in that article, but it's a grocery list app! When is the last time I asked for support for the sticky note attached to my refrigerator? I don't doubt that there are indeed customers who need support from time to time, but surely it's a small minority.

These seem to just be contrived arguments to protect their customer data selling bottom line.

Yep, my feelings exactly after reading. All this whining happens only when your business is very dependent on specific information that gets taken from you.

Definitely picked up the same intentions from the post.

Seems out of place to complain about not having email addresses for "support" reasons.

If they truly cannot help users without asking for their email address, maybe they should not have users (login) then.

This.

The blog post was long and winded. And it brought up some very desperate arguments, like the bug bounty offered to hackers when they report security vulnerabilities.

They want people's email addresses, period.

They say that no email breaks the sharing feature. True. But that's something that can be offered later when someone actually does share something with you. They say that the emails will go to the a seldom checked account. True. But users can change email addresses. They say it breaks support service for looking up accounts without email addresses. Again true. But what's another way of looking up accounts? Username. What is another? Apple ID.

They are email network harvesters. Plain and simple. And this is their business model.

And their whining about not getting email addresses is exactly why I would not want to give mine.

That's exactly what I'm thinking! Further I can't find the EULA of the app on the internet - maybe I'll find it later. But I could bet that they sell the data for marketing purposes. And I could also bet that they removed Facebook not because they don't want to use it but because they had to implement Sign in with Apple which would result in the Data being not so valuable because the standard option is to obfuscate the mail address.

Having any kind of subscription payment massively increases complexity and support requirements in your app.

The article says "When you provide us with your email address, it is never sold, shared, or used to invade your privacy." So, one of you is lying. I don't have the means to determine who, but I don't see what your motivation for lying would be, but can see what theirs may be.

And to extend that, if they are a spammy company, that would be exactly why they would be complaining about SIWAI.

It wasn't sold or shared, the emails came from them. But they were pure marketing, not transactional, and I certainly didn't agree to it or want it.

> automatically subscribed me to a marketing list

Side note, disabling 'load remote content' in email client stops all spam in a while, they think emails are not read.

Using Gmail at all seems to have the same effect as well since they pre-load and proxy almost all email content. Only when you use alternative mail clients might they see the images/remote content being loaded from a non-google IP.