From Discord:
Hello @everyone,
Unfortunately today is the day I have to announce that LunaSea is no longer being published and all related cloud services (including notifications) will be shut down in the near future.
For more information on when things will be shut down, please read the details here: https://www.lunasea.app/
I understand that this comes as a surprise and originally was not the intention for the project. However, with recently enforced changes by the Play Store (and possible other storefronts in the future) to require showcasing your legal personal residential address, I am no longer comfortable publishing mobile applications for privacy reasons.
Luckily for some time I have been able to get around this by utilizing an older ID to showcase an address I no longer reside at. Unfortunately, this no longer works and I am required to re-verify which I am not willing to do.
With this shut down also marks the closure of the Discord and Subreddit. For the time being this Subreddit and Discord will remain open, however all channels have been removed and no new posts allowed in the subreddit.
Once again, thank you to everyone for everything over the years, I couldn’t have asked for a better community. ❤️
I wonder why they just don’t publish on the fDroid store and continue?
Scratching my head over this as well. Yes, it might diminish casual discovery uptake that the app isn’t in the Play Store, but for this target group I think most users would be comfortable downloading the app from Fdroid.
The larger issue with closing down the entire project including notification servers(!?) is probably a tell that there have been other factors weighing on the developer?
Either way, if the source code is openly available maybe others will pick up development in a way that isn’t as vulnerable to corporate policy changes.
Because they don’t want to obviously and is using this as a good way to shut down their work