Open any popular "free" mobile app and the moment it loads, dozens of things are already in motion. An advertising SDK has been initialised. An analytics pipeline has registered a session. A third-party tracking library has fingerprinted your device. A real-time bidding system has, in the time it took the splash screen to fade, auctioned a slot for an ad to be shown to you in particular — based on what it knows about you from this app and a hundred others that share data with it. None of that is rare. Most of that is what makes the app "free."
Drimin doesn't do any of this. Not because we are unusually principled, but because we did the maths and concluded the trade isn't worth it — for us or for you. This piece is about that maths.
"Free" is a price, not an absence of price
Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is the canonical text here, but the short version is older: if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. The modern wrinkle is that even when you are paying for the product, you are often also being measured, modelled, and monetised on the side. Free, in app stores, has come to mean "we make money in a way that you don't see on the price tag."
The most honest framing of "free" is: the app costs you nothing in money, and an unspecified amount in attention and personal data. The question is whether you'd agree to that trade if it were written on the install screen.
What zero telemetry actually costs to ship
Building Drimin without telemetry isn't free in engineering terms. It costs us:
- Visibility into crashes. No Crashlytics means we find out about a regression from a one-star review or a friend's bug report, not a dashboard. The mitigation is more careful testing pre-release, and a willingness to ship a fix and apologise.
- Visibility into usage. No analytics means we don't know which features are used and which aren't. We can talk to users, watch sessions in person, run pre-release cohorts. We cannot watch a funnel.
- Acquisition channels. No SDKs means no attribution. We can't tell whether a campaign on platform X drove more installs than platform Y. Most acquisition decisions become editorial rather than data-driven.
- Monetisation flexibility. No ads means no per-impression revenue floor, and no "we'll worry about money later" cushion. The app has to either be paid, free-for-now-paid-later, or supported some other way.
For an app of Drimin's category — a small, well-defined utility with a defined feature surface — this is a tolerable set of constraints. For other categories (large games, social products, ad-driven media) it would be ruinous. That's fine. Not every app has to be built this way. We are arguing for honesty about the trade, not for universality of the choice.
The actual cost of telemetry to you
Telemetry has three costs to the user that rarely show up in the conversation:
- Battery and data. Background analytics pings, ad SDK initialisation, attribution callbacks, real-time bidding payloads — these all add up. A 2018 Princeton CITP study found that the median mobile app made network calls to over six tracking domains, often within seconds of launch.
- Latency. Many ad SDKs block the main thread during init, adding hundreds of milliseconds to cold start. The trend toward "lazy" SDK loading helps, but the floor is still higher than zero-SDK apps.
- Attack surface. Every third-party SDK is third-party code with network privileges running in your app's process. If one of them is compromised, your app is compromised. There is a long, ugly history of SDK supply-chain incidents.
Drimin avoids all three by carrying nothing it doesn't ship itself. The full list of network-capable libraries in the app is zero. (And the app couldn't use them anyway — see Privacy-first by default.)
Every dependency that "phones home" is a vote against the user's interest. The decision to ship none of them is the most consequential one a small app can make.
How a free, ad-free app pays for itself
The honest answer for Drimin: it doesn't, yet, in the sense of revenue. It is a small project shipped under The VoBot Developers umbrella, alongside other things that do generate revenue. The work is sustained by adjacent projects rather than by the app itself. That is a deliberate model, not an accident.
The longer-term options for a project like this are well-trodden:
- A one-time paid version on the Play Store, with the current free build remaining available.
- An optional "supporter" in-app purchase that doesn't unlock anything — you pay if you want to, you get the same app either way.
- A simple, transparent donation page.
None of these is exciting. None of them scales the way an ad-supported business scales. But all of them are honest, and any of them is sufficient for an app of this size to keep being maintained. The bar is "covers a developer's time on it"; not "becomes a unicorn."
What this is, and isn't
This isn't a moral argument that every app must be free of telemetry. Apps with genuine remote services need a way to operate them, and many businesses are upfront about the trade. The argument is narrower: if an app has no meaningful reason to call home — which is the case for an enormous class of utilities — the default ought to be that it doesn't. The fact that "free + ads + telemetry" became the industry default for that category is a path-dependence problem, not a technical necessity.
Drimin is one small data point in the other direction. The app does what a water tracker should do, costs you nothing in money or attention, and ships none of the machinery the rest of the category considers table stakes. The economics aren't glamorous. They are, however, possible.
For the architectural decisions that make this credible, see Privacy-first by default and Offline-first as a feature, not a fallback. For the design philosophy that follows from them, see Designing for stillness.