I’m the same, those dongles don’t last, and are annoying to use. I picked up one of these cables from aliexpress to use with my iems and it works a treat. There’s better quality cables out there, but for 10 bucks these are solid.

Basically all tracking is done by Google ads. It checks at start up if you have purchased ad free or not. If purchased, launch app without ad library, else launch with ads. It has to be in the code because (according to the dev) Google is cracking down on similar apps, ie a pro version and a free version. So ad library has to be included, and it just won’t use it if you pay for pro

100 bucks is only for the extra features. Just to remove ads is $20, which is admittedly still high