I'm not trying to be insensitive here. But look at it this way - if someone offers something in the market for a set price (whatever that is), I figure it's up to them to figure out how to manage their lives. Maybe they sell it too low and take a loss. Maybe it costs them only half of what they charge and make awesome profit. I don't know and shouldn't really care. The Google Play Marketplace isn't a charity. People offer things and hope customers get in on it. They charge what they want for THEIR reasons. I buy or not buy for MY reasons.
For Textra - here are some options about it being free. Again, I don't know if any of them are true. But people talk about free like it _shouldn't_ happen. Each of these are maybes.
1. It was meant as a way to get people used to 3rd party SMS apps in hopes that they would upgrade to ChompSMS for all the theme support and fancy features.
2. It was meant as a corporate experiment, to have something testing super hard by hundreds of thousands of users because they were going to sell a version that did encrypted messaging for the government or high-security companies.
3. It was going to be Free, Open Source Software (FOSS) for other people to bugfix and extend.
4. It was a hobby and they didn't want to mess with all the customer service nonsense they'd have to do if people paid for it and expected it to work all the time flawlessly.
5. It was a calling card. You could farm out your mobile interface skills as a consultant or contractor and make big bucks. This was the most awesomest business card of all time.
6. It was a way to test out new features for ChompSMS without interfering with the paid ecosystem of their other software. People don't like paid software to break, right? This way only the things that worked out would be included. Textra would be constantly changing but since it was free, nobody would be demanding refunds or complaining.
And there might be others. How the dev manages his life, what the project was meant to accomplish, when he updates it, charges for it, etc... That's all up to him. But don't think to yourself - he HAD to start charging for it eventually. Maybe, maybe not. But if he decided to charge for it, he might have found a way to attract his customers with honey (an awesome way to handle group MMS? better theme support? in-depth SMS scheduling?) than with vinegar (add things to make the customer angry and then charge the customer to remove the irritation).
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