Focusing on just the player, it's a great option.

• One time payment for advanced features, no subscription.
• Extremely customizable; visually, the audio output, how shuffle works (totally random, or favor less recently songs)
• Sync - I just directly sync my PC media and playlist folders to my phone, told poweramp where the folder is, and it just works.
• EQ settings, per device. Bluetooth headphones have a different curve than the bluetooth car. You could do per song if you're ever so inclined.
• support for high fidelity audio if your device supports it.
• Android Auto Support
• "driving mode" support (when using maps on phone)
• support for internet radio stations.

Well, I can say that it's worth it. Once you tweak the settings a little for your device, the only thing that sounds as good is neutron, and neutron is a hot mess ui wise. If you use a device that has its own on board "hi res" hardware, there isn't anything that's going to sound as good, even usbplayer pro (which is better if you want bit-perfect playback only, but it doesn't seem that's your priority) or neutron.

Mind you, this all assumes that you're chasing "better" sound in the first place. See, android's native sound processing is what most players will use. There's only a handful that do anything else at all. And it's that sound processing that's going to be your main limiter in chasing an ideal.

If you aren't going to care about any of that, then literally any player on fdroid is going to sound the same in general (the last I went through them anyway). So you're picking by ui/ux, which is a different thing entirely. Now, I prefer poweramp's ui as well, it really is laid out almost perfectly for my wants.

The licensing for non-google usage isn't onerous imo. Nor is it particularly expensive.

I completely agree and can't recommend this app enough. There's so many things going for it compared to everything else out there. I use it every day also after churning through all the other ones out there and never feeling satisfied. The total app size is like 25MB and doesn't even request the internet permission. With not having the internet permission you don't even have to worry about what data is being sent back to the developer - the answer is none. Despite being incredibly lightweight it's somehow got more features than many other apps, and implemented extremely well.

It's free but you do get a couple extra advanced features for a small IAP such as a ChromeCast plugin and auto playlists (Most Played etc). Despite not even needing any of the features I paid for the lifetime access simply because I find that much value in this app and when you come across a diamond like this app it makes you want to give back.