Hey, Knowlessman!
I am glad to clarify these things to you. As the gamedev, I tend to make things confused.
Statues are only visual for the chapter completation. The more you advance the more flowery they get.
You can use Akes at a camp to trade for lives, but maybe in an update, you'll have more choices. For now, that is it.
The forums tell me that the "parse error" with APK has a chance to be cleared by uninstalling and removing the file, then downloading and installing it again.
And you're basically right, APK ports from HTML are much softer than the Desktop version