Aside from being unethical to withdraw a developer's income from a good app, it can also break the operation and even cause an account ban. It is one thing to avoid ads and annoying pop-ups, which is legitimate and easy with the aforementioned Blokada or another DNS blocker, and another to hack an paid app or game.

Apart from the Tech review

4 different antivirus engines on virustotal flags the app. So, the app definitely has malicious files which can raise serious security concerns. The app also needs root access to work at its full potential, so by granting the root access, we allow the app to modify system files.

And Google also know the download of this app, Blacklight Report of the Lucky Patcher site

Blacklight detected this website sending user data to Alphabet, the technology conglomerate that encompasses Google and associated companies like Nest. The Silicon Valley giant collects data from twice the number of websites as its closest competitor, Facebook. An Alphabet spokesperson told The Markup that internet users can go here if they want to opt out of the company showing them targeted ads based on their browsing history.

The site sent information to the following domains google-analytics.com, googletagmanager.com.

Vvery careful with this in an OS full controlled by Google.

[–] nuII@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

I would argue it's unethical of them to force their obnoxious ads on people and that they're not losing any revenue because the person that would patch an app to remove said annoyances would also be likely to just uninstall it if they were unable to patch it.

[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 years ago

Ads are certainly not ethical at all, especially if you are in a waiting room, office and so as not to want to disturb, you turn off the sound of the game, with which you are spending time, but nevertheless an ad at full volume jumps in the middle , already independent of the annoyances with these banners and pop-ups. This should go to hell. But I do not find at all legitimate that a dev with many hours of work makes a nice and useful app and wants for this a few Euros to have some income from his work and a user hacks this app to save these few euros. Against annoying advertising companies anything goes, but with the work of others you should not get involved.