Thank you for the very thoroughly detailed reply!
> I'd be very wary of using it on anything new.
That makes sense and I can understand it. On the other hand, the a text editor and todo app aren't exactly new apps ideas.
> "Save this note to Dropbox" or "Open Twitter with this note's content as the tweet" and the list goes on.
Perhaps this is a failing on my part again but... how is that an app problem? If the user has a Dropbox account or Twitter account then don't those provide the services through the OS? So every app works with Dropbox (or Nextcloud or Google Drive or their local filesystem) and every app can share a link to Twitter (or to Nextcloud or Slack or Discord or Twitch or ...). Why does the app need special integrations with the provider?
I would argue that's a failure of Dropbox or Twitter. They shouldn't provide APIs or toolkits that apps need to use. They should integrate with the OS and become a provider of services to the OS. Then every app gets the ability to save things to Dropbox or post something to Twitter.
> Apollo lets you use the base app for free but for nice/power-user features you have to pay for a subscription.
Cool. Apollo isn't a text editor or a todo app though.
> I have plenty of iOS games that have died because they were never updated. I paid for them once and now they don't run at all on my phone
I assume they don't run on your current phone. Do they still run on your old phone?
> Mobile development is difficult and needs to be ongoing which leads us to subscriptions seeing how there isn't a better method out there that I'm aware of.
Mobile development doesn't need to be difficult. It's made difficult by Apple's continuously-moving goalposts.
> BBEdit charges for the new major versions of it's app and to me, if you are releasing on a regular schedule, that's pretty much the same as a subscription.
In many ways, I agree. But there's one important distinction. I can pull up my old Mac OS 9 machine and run my old BBEdit on it. I'd be willing to bet that if I bought BBEdit ten years ago for Mac OS X on Intel then it would still run on today's Mac OS X even if it doesn't have all of the fancy new features of a new version.
> Subscriptions help solve part of that problem by incentivizing developers to keep their apps updated or people will leave for ones that do.
I don't have a problem whatsoever paying for new features that I want and use.
What I have a problem with is this:
> apps as simple as text editors or todo apps needlessly becoming subscription services
Basic text editors and todo apps were solved decades ago. Why do users need to pay for simple text editors as a subscription service? That's a failure of Apple's ecosystem.
You clearly want to migrate the discussion to continued developer support and new features. So let's do that then.
Let me walk you through my experience. I want to use a terminal on my iPhone. I know that I get terminals for free in Mac OS, Linux, and even Windows has a command prompt. They're literally free. So I see the lack of one in iOS as anti-consumer. Or, most definitely, anti-power-user. But whatever. In Apple's infinite wisdom, users shouldn't have a terminal emulator. So off to the app store I go to search for one.
The first result for "terminal" is Termius. It says it needs `in-app purchases`. In-app purchases for a terminal emulator? That sounds like a scam.
The next one, xTerminal, also needs in-app purchses.
The third one, LibTerm, doesn't say that it needs in-app purchases. But it's 448.7MB in size. Why the hell does a terminal emulator need that much storage to install? Nope, sounds like malware.
The fourth one, SSH Client, also wants in-app purchases.
I've scrolled two pages and all four of the top results smell fishy. So I don't install a terminal on my phone. I keep using Linux because it does what I want for free.
Tech marching on doesn't need to bring scammy baggage with it. Apple's walled garden ecosystem has brought that. And they're not policing their walled garden against anti-consumer behavior.