[Nexus 5 Original Android Development] big_adventure:
Starting a bit of a rant here...

You can justify your action all you like, but it is, by definition, stealing. By your own admission, you don't talk to the dev and ask for a free version to test. You don't try the free, function-limited or ad-supported versions to test. You don't pay and then use the established refund procedures to get a refund. No, you use a patching tool to pretend you've bought stuff you haven't bought, combined with illegally acquiring the software to install it.

Now, you say that you pay up for stuff that needs paying for. Well, you might. You might not. The thing is, you are actively running a service that lets you ignore that step if you feel like it. Since you don't seem to be in the business of testing apps and don't seem to be doing it at the moment, why is this service running on the phone?

Imagine this scenario: you really want a new BMW. You could trust the reviews for advice and you could test drive the BMW, but, boohoo, a test drive might not be enough to, you know, benefit from the BMW for 2 months without paying for it. So you steal the BMW. And you drive it for 2 months. At the end of the two months, you either leave it on the side of the road, paying not a dime for the benefits you received driving a BMW for 2 months, or you leave it on the side of the road (still not paying for what you've used so far) and go buy a BMW at the dealership. In addition, to do this, you acquire a bunch of tools and skills highly useful to stealing cars, and, in fact, you carry them around with you all the time.

Do you think that the off chance that you like the car and that you might share your opinion with a couple of friends way down the road justifies stealing the car for 2 months? Especially since, if you don't like the car, you're likely to share a nasty opinion about it?

Or, even better (a bit like what happened here), how do you think it goes when you arrive at the dealership, asking the mechanic for help, in what may or may not be a stolen car, with the tools in your hands?

Just note, I'm not judging you, because I don't care at all if you steal apps or if you don't, and if you do, I don't care what you tell yourself or others about the practice. But don't go around pretending that it's noble work you're doing. Because it isn't. Or that you are really doing it for the poor developers based on some nebulous long-term (and totally imagined - had you bought the app up front and liked it, you'd have shared your positive opinion anyway, encouraging the same number of other buyers) benefit from piracy, because you aren't. You are doing it to avoid paying for stuff you are supposed to pay for (even if it isn't permanent), and taking advantage of the fact that, unlike, say, stealing the car or robbing a bank, this crime is effectively impossible to trace or enforce, and, since you don't need to put yourself at risk, doesn't really require that you admit what you are doing.

I have friends who hack their X-Boxes or jailbreak iPads to run pirated games. Or they have gigabytes of pirated music or terabytes of pirated videos. They actually say things like "it's not stealing!" because they have rationalized that the crime is more-or-less equal to the risk you have to take to pull it off. These same people would never, in a million years, walk into a store and walk out with a purloined CD.

-ending rant. Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine. I really don't care if you do it, at all, but pretending it's something else gets stuck in my craw.