I absolutely love the app but won't use it! I get that you need money for all this work and I am happy to pay for such an amazing peace of software but Goole payments rely on Google Play Services and many privacy caughous users (like me) have degoogled phones so the app is essentially useless to me and probably tons of other potential customers! :(
I think you might be overestimating that market segment tbh. I'm sure there's some folks who Hardline like you, but I'm sure that number is exceptionally low by percentage.
Also, I think it's totally valid to not want to share your data with a company, but I've seen a lot of confusion before as though Google is selling your data and just for clarity, that's absolutely not what they do. You don't want to have your data in their ownership? Valid. You don't want them to resell what they collect from you? Unfounded and a literal negative business value for them.
I actually think you underestimate how many Lemmy users value privacy and use degoogled phones! Google (and western tech companies in general) dont sell your data and share it with relatively few third parties (far from none) but that's not the point of privacy advocates, at least not serious ones...
Basically every single user of a degoogled phone dose and that's usually more than Linux users from my experience with the open source community so I would say probably basically every Lemmy user who was there before the Reddit shitshow and probably a bunch who came afterwards too, I might be wrong here but I think in terms of Lemmy users it's actually quite a bunch but idk how many of them would stick to open source alternatives anyway