It is sad, but it's either you cooperate or you get shut down; or worse, you get put to jail.
There is always a third option which is full decentralization and full transparency.
Unless the dev lives in a traditional dictatorship (instead of the modern dictatorship) they can always be transparent about everything including if the government has put any pressure on them to change any part of the open source code they've released and also being open source and decentralized, any such change would be found out immediately.