bluegopher

You are confusing infrastructure projects with enduser application projects. The former welcome your work because there is (usually) a monetization path for it and your bugreport actually IS a bugreport (what is the intended behavior, what is the actual behavior, how can the bug be triggered). The later ones typically get swamped with "it doesn't work, fix it!" which then turns into a game of twenty questions and the conclusion that the user was doing something stupid(TM).

Also, seeing your nickname, I'd like to mention "Medienkompetenzübung": The point of the article is not about not accepting bug reports, but support requests being disguised as bug reports in order to bypass the fee, to a point where the abuse greatly outweighted the benefits. The logical conclusion: shut the channel down at the risk of loosing some value. I believe, you have a similar policy with the killfile for your blog.

Why would this be unexpected? You can buy apps on Play. You can also cancel your purchase 5 minutes later. In that case it stands to reason that Google would want to have a way to remove the app from your device.

Yep, they can. AFAIR this feature was used once in the past after a court order to delete an app that was very popular in south america (brazil?), but contained a nasty sideload.

I can't find an an article backing this up though.

Not really that far fetched. It's the Raccoon blog. Raccoon, being an open source APK downloader partially reimplemens the play store app and app discovery is what that app is all about.

Part of the problem is also that Google promised developers a large Android community, und users free apps. Obviously there's a slight problem with getting paid for work here.

With this culture of "free", it's no wonder if app developers cave and sell out to shady companies.