itch.io

Thanks for the reply! Just so you know, RenPy itself doesn’t normally request things like IMEI/MEID/ESN, root status checks, GPS location, paired Bluetooth device lists, clipboard monitoring, or audio recording permissions. Those aren’t part of the default engine permissions on Android builds, so something in your APK is explicitly adding them.

If you didn’t code those in yourself, it might be worth double checking your build process and any libraries you’ve included, because the permission profile here matches what we usually see in malware flagged apks, not vanilla RenPy games. This is the first  RenPy VN I've seen on here that has these attributes, so it piqued my interest. 

Hey! I was really enjoying checking out your visual novel and was curious about some of the technical stuff behind it. I noticed it requests access to things like GPS location, microphone, camera, clipboard monitoring, paired Bluetooth devices, and the device’s IMEI/unique ID. It also seems to check if the phone is rooted and uses obfuscation/reflection. That all sounds a bit advanced for a VN, so I was wondering, are these tied to specific gameplay features? I'd love to understand the reasoning!

itch could've backed their content creators but instead they folded. They absolutely had a choice and they made the wrong one, they're telling payment processors that they control the market and content creation as a whole. This is a spiral and a bad one at that.