Yup, ZippoApps just bought this one. It’s a company that basically buys apps then pumps them full of invasive (bordering on spyware) bloat to capture the data from existing users. It’s a typical corporate strategy, where they buy a popular app, extract every single cent they can from it, then discard it once it’s a shell of its former self, for the next popular app.

That's exactly what happened.

I'm just speculating here, but I've seen where app developers pull in a framework for a feature and it comes with all sorts of hidden gems since the framework was developed by a large corporation. The small development team now needs to consider writing their own framework (an established anti-pattern), find another (that may have the same problems or be less mature, etc) or include the privacy invading code and plan to replace it in a future release (which never happens because users want new features and the privacy concerned users have left).