> I don’t know what country you are from, but I’m guessing the “free” vastly outweighed the “ad supported”. Furthermore, given the low ad revenue in developing countries, an organization seeking money probably could have gotten just as much by seeking a government grant or funding from a non-profit/NGO, and the whole process probably would have been easier in terms of securing revenue as well as app design (i.e., not having to design the app around ads).

I agree, a hypothetical universe with paid apps subsidised for students and for people from developing nations would be better, but I haven't seen this happen in practice (and it's difficult for the reasons I mentioned before - it's hard to ensure that it isn't abused.)

> I appreciate what you are saying broadly, but google ads doesn’t seem like the optimal way to facilitate this type of information creation and dissemination in developing countries.

I said nothing about Google Ads in my comment - the best example of an ad subsidised service that helped in this context would be Stack Overflow, who, AFAIK run their own ad network.

> Furthermore, Google has shifted from having “don’t be evil” as part of their code of conduct to straight up doing evil things. Trying to dress these actions up as being a boon for the developing world is approaching if not reaching the level of being a corporate shill. Again, there are better and probably easier ways to do this other than kowtowing to the Googlith.

I just wanted to share my personal experience here in the hope that folks here take the users I mentioned into account - whether that's through an ad supported business model, or subscription based business models that are affordable for them.

Imagine a dystopian novel where people who don't own toilets are forced to lose a quarter of their portable device's viewport to look at glamorous photos of products for rich people living on the other side of their globe.

That's Android right now. Yeesh.