Simple Mobile apps have been very popular among FOSS enthusiasts. I've personally been using the Gallery, Contacts and the Phone app since a few years now. It's a shame that it has come to this, will be on the lookout for their forks.
Well to be fair, for most software it was the major releases that were paid, and the minor ones were given free, on the understanding that these ~never contained functionality changes, additions or reworks.
So 3.1 was purely a bugfix for 3.0, for example. Hence you got it free. Often when 4.0 came out (which you had to pay to get) there's also a be a 3.2 update that served as the "final" rleease of that branch. Any bugs in it now are there to stay.
And yeah. Although, I feel in a way that's what we got here, no? If I paid for these I can turn updates off and use the version I bought, so to speak.