This reminds me of my own painful story: I once made a local photo search app called Queryable that ported OpenAI's CLIP model to iPhone, letting you search your photos with queries like "a black cat sitting on a sofa."

Since it needed to access users' local photo libraries, I didn't want the app to connect to the internet under any circumstances. So I made it a paid app instead of the usual free+in-app purchases model, since the latter requires calling StoreKit which goes online. But because the app had to run the CLIP model, it would crash on lower-performance phones like the iPhone X. Users who paid for it couldn't use it and felt scammed, leading to tons of one-star reviews and angry complaints about their photos being stolen. Eventually I decided to open-source the app, though it never brought me much revenue anyway.

Two years later, Apple started announcing they'd be integrating this exact feature into Apple Intelligence : )