Afaik what got them was providing fixes for an unreleased game behind a paywall. Hard to deny the piracy aspect when you are actively profiting off of it.

There are a lot of reasons here which are correct, but one huge Factor when I was working with custom roms was the fact that the actual underlying hardware driver and firmware were a black box. Generally speaking you would need to harvest the binary files that made things like the camera, gps, and/or touchscreen work. Sometimes it wasnt too hard if you were going from one android skin to another that used the same underlining operating system, but if you wanted to make serious changes, and the phone manufacturer wasn’t great at sharing, it could take a very long time to figure out what data needed to be passed to the camera to make it turn on and be available to use. What got even worse is if you wanted to upgrade your android version (5 to 6 lets say), where android made serious changes under the hood, you ran the risk of having these blobs not even work with the system. They would expect something that android no longer passed or provided. Or they were using some deprecated API to make their function a accessable. It just became impossible to do without being able to recompile the binary only portions that weren’t subject to the gpl. As android has gotten more security conscious it has made things even more complicated.

Most can bind it an IP even if they don’t bind to an interface. I use rtorrent and airvpn/wireguard. Wireguard uses a static IP address for the client and rtorrent can bind to that IP. If the VPN goes down (which is very rare in my experience) rtorrent stays running but it won’t work on any other IP address.

Airvpn has been flawless for me even if they aren’t the fastest. Wireguard has been very stable with them, and they are very configurable on their web interface. Plus the staff is very very helpful if you need it. My Seedboxes are on 24/7 and I am not racing with them, everything is long term. I can still hit 50mbps upload but it is rare.

Edit: I use to espouse PIA but they mad a bunch of changes and I couldn’t script requesting a port any more. With airvpn you choose what ports you want on the website, assign them to a profile, and when you connect with that profile the port is automatically forwarded to your IP… no need to request a port and your selectes ports never change which makes configuring your app a lot simpler.

If you prefer usenet, work your way into a few good private trackers. If you prefer torrents, get an invite to a couple of indexers. Backup methods are key to success.