Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coming changes to Apple's App Store

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 294 posts

Re: Coming changes to Apple's App Store

#211

Post by hardwaresofton »

conorgil145 wrote: post #183
sangnoir wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is moral is creating a system by which software developers can support themselves by creating products that are useful to the community Speaking as a developer - what kind of entitled, self-important thinking is this? No one owes developers a decent lifestyle or a liveable income. I can't wait till some idiot sells a subscription to a calculator or flashlight app - I say to them GTFO! The app 'industry' is not…

> No one owes developers a decent lifestyle or a liveable income. If the developer cannot make a living by creating an app (or any other piece of software for that matter), why would they bother creating it at all? > If Nike sold you an indestructible trainer (including non-wearing sole) that you could buy tomorrow, would you rather buy it outright or pay subscriptions in perpertuity This is not a great comparison. A…

> If the developer cannot make a living by creating an app (or any other piece of software for that matter), why would they bother creating it at all?

If you're trying to make a living doing X, and you can't, then don't do it anymore. There are tens of thousands of apps that did not need to be made, yet were (no doubt the first step of someone's get-rich-quick scheme). If there is a need, the need will be met, eventually, by someone, and if it is truly a "need", people will be willing to pay money for it.

As others have mentioned, requiring updates to run correctly is actually a fault of the underlying system, and the change therein.

> People should be paid for creating and maintaining software.

This "should" is really nebulous. By whose standard/ethics? What belief system led you to believe that you were guaranteed to be paid for your work (software or otherwise)? You get paid when you sell something. You can create the shit out of lots of things and maintain lots of things, and not see a dime for your efforts. Software is no different -- you need to create something that will SELL and be profitable.

These two things do not go hand in hand. Creating and a necessity of maintenance are not necessarily the case. Remember when software used to be sold on CDs? You bought and were able to use the software for your given operating system, and for the given time that it had no bugs. There were no other guarantees, and I don't think there should be today.

If something in your app breaks, release an update and either release it for free, or charge for it. There is no need for me to pay you forever -- your certainly won't be releasing updates forever.

It's obvious why companies want to move everyone to this model though -- much easier to setup recurring incomes, and once it's ingrained in the culture, people won't remember a time when you bought a piece of software and you actually owned it.

Maybe this will be a chance for F/OSS to make a resurgence? Once people get tired of paying for Office 365 and their Flappy Bird subscription, they'll start looking for software that they can truly own

Re: Coming changes to Apple's App Store

#212

Post by rbritton »

andyfleming wrote: post #182
berkut wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with subscriptions is that it allows the app maker to potentially not maintain and improve their app while still earning money. I've been employed by companies (who I've now left) where the management explicitly wanted to move to subscription for this reason: not having to keep adding new features to get customers to buy new versions. (apps were desktop software). That's not to say subscription doesn't ma…

Yeah, that's what's nice about IntelliJ products. You can stop subscribing and are left with a perpetual license for the current version you are on. It provides protection for the stagnation issue you are talking about.

This is the one thing that sold me on recently switching to one of their products. I absolutely refuse to pay Adobe's subscription because I don't get a perpetual license ever.

Re: Coming changes to Apple's App Store

#213

Post by intrasight »

Reading this discussion, I've seen several comment on the "hassle of managing all those subscriptions". But wouldn't it be the case that the app store is going to do that for you, and give you both a single notification channel and a single point of management? Isn't that the whole purpose of managing the subscriptions through the app store instead of having customers visit your web site directly? Isn't that what Apple is getting %15 to perform?

Re: Coming changes to Apple's App Store

#214

Post by nitrogen »

Androider wrote: post #196
nitrogen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apps are a service. No. Flat out no. If I spend $x0 or $x00 for an app to create something (music, code, mechanical drawing, whatever), I darn well better be able to access my music/code/drawing at any point in the future, even if the maker of the app has gone out of business.

Many, perhaps even most, popular mobile apps have some sort of online component that will surely stop working if the business is closed. And apps made for an OS two releases back or more regularly seem to stop working if not updated. I know I've certainly got paid apps that simply do not work at all anymore. This is not a new phenomenon. Try running a game made for Windows XP or even Photoshop 6.0 on Windows 10, it l…

I disagree with the subscription model helping in the long run, because with a flat fee model, you at least have a chance of keeping the old version running. If I like something and the developers add new features, I'll buy the upgrades to get new features; that's how developer incentives can align with mine.

Re: Coming changes to Apple's App Store

#215

Post by emptybits »

veidr wrote: post #190
chasing wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to address two things, here: 1) You're absolutely right: Pricing matters. If I charge you $10/mo for my app that sends you a text message every time there's a full moon, that would be way too expensive and you'd be well within your rights as a consumer to spend your money on something else. As far as I'm aware, Apple will not force you to subscribe to any apps. 2) "... subscriptions are immoral..." Bullshit. A…

Subscriptions are immoral, but not for those reasons. It's an immoral business model because its success is based on bilking people -- cheating them into paying for 'service' when they don't want to. The mechanism is simple: the slight inconvenience of cancellation prevents a huge number of users from cancelling as soon as they want to. This is why getting your customers to set up automated and recurring payments is…

> Try putting a confirmation screen in your app that makes the user press "Renew" each month before the app charges them again. That would move you toward the moral end of the spectrum, but it would gut your sales.

I like this experiment. If I had to bet, I think you're right that it would reduce revenue.

OTOH, to be fair, try this approach in the old-fashioned model... take the standard (large) transaction up front, offer a lifetime money-back guarantee (a very moral policy, to be sure), and then put a launch dialog in your app with two buttons: "Refund Now" and "Continue Using".

I predict one would also see reduced revenues by taking what could be considered moral high ground in the non-subscription model.

Re: Coming changes to Apple's App Store

#216

Post by snowwrestler »

post_break wrote: post #161
MBCook wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy Tweetbot today, it will work tomorrow. If Twitter changes the API on Monday, how many versions back should Tweetbot have to support based on a single $2 (or whatever) a few years ago? That's the issue. People get pissed there isn't perma-support for apps that need constant updates. This is a way to make that more feasible.

Tweetbot is kind of an edge case since they depend on a third party. A better example would be an application that does something, like a notes app, like noteability.

Every iOS app depends on third parties: Apple, since that is the platform the app runs on; any libraries or development platforms built into the app; if the app talks to a server, the server is a dependency, and of course all the dependencies the server has...

Somewhere along these lines, the software will need to be updated repeatedly: security updates, API changes, SDK changes, etc.

Software just does not stand still like we think it does from the consumer perspective. Any app in production is going to have maintenance costs and forced upgrades that will be an ongoing cost to the developer.

I grew up in a world where software came on a disc, I bought it and installed it it was mine. A perpetual subscription model feels to me like ransomware--"pay up or you'll never see your app again." But I have to admit that I know that the costs of having an app in production today are continuous.

Re: Coming changes to Apple's App Store

#217

Post by rpgmaker »

bad_user wrote: post #92
chasing wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the mindset change that needs to happen is this: Apps are a service. I would actually prefer to pay developers of apps that are truly useful to me a monthly amount so I know they can continue to update and improve the app. If an app saves me $1000/yr in headache, I'd prefer to spend $30/yr on a subscription rather than lose the app entirely because the developers can't keep the lights on.

There aren't many apps that can save you 1000/year. I keep hearing this, but that's nonsense. If a "service" is not producing money and isn't saving you time allowing you to produce money, then it's not worth paying for. Yes, I have subscriptions for IntelliJ IDEA, for Dropbox, for FastMail and for a DigitalOcean VPS. All these are producing money for me. But the list ends here. Because here's the thing: $5/month her…

> More importantly, subscriptions are immoral because the end result is robbing users of any sense of ownership.

I don't know why people allowed this transition from software ownership to subscription to happen (although they really weren't given the choice). It's ridiculous that the customer is giving away his MS Office ownership in exchange for the marginal improvements that MS has been doing in the last couple of releases.

Most people here on HN (me included) would benefit from this development but I agree with you: subscriptions are immoral.

PS: IntelliJ IDEA it's great but it is ridiculously expensive imho.

Re: Coming changes to Apple's App Store

#218

Post by shostack »

rbritton wrote: post #212
andyfleming wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's what's nice about IntelliJ products. You can stop subscribing and are left with a perpetual license for the current version you are on. It provides protection for the stagnation issue you are talking about.

This is the one thing that sold me on recently switching to one of their products. I absolutely refuse to pay Adobe's subscription because I don't get a perpetual license ever.

The other issue with Adobe's shift to subscriptions that upset many is that you absolutely did not need a subscription for Lightroom and Photoshop for most users. The small incremental changes were not needed by many, and if a new feature came along worth paying for they would upgrade. This was very forced.

Sure, charge a subscription for Creative Cloud but taking software that worked fine without a subscription, tacking one on under the guise of perpetual updates and killing access if they stop paying stinks of doing what is best for the business, not what is best for the customers.

Re: Coming changes to Apple's App Store

#219

Post by School-Cotton »

theli0nheart wrote: post #104
bad_user wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't many apps that can save you 1000/year. I keep hearing this, but that's nonsense. If a "service" is not producing money and isn't saving you time allowing you to produce money, then it's not worth paying for. Yes, I have subscriptions for IntelliJ IDEA, for Dropbox, for FastMail and for a DigitalOcean VPS. All these are producing money for me. But the list ends here. Because here's the thing: $5/month her…

> I for one hate renting things, I prefer ownership. I applaud your idealism, but with this attitude, you might as well not buy any apps at all. When you buy an app, or TV show, or pretty much anything digital in 2016, you're purchasing a license, not the thing itself. You don't "own" anything. Even if you can download the app you buy in 2016 in 5 years from now, what are the odds that it still works on whatever oper…

This isnt unique to 2016; it has been true since the invention of copyright.

Re: Coming changes to Apple's App Store

#220

Post by sambe »

veidr wrote: post #190
chasing wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to address two things, here: 1) You're absolutely right: Pricing matters. If I charge you $10/mo for my app that sends you a text message every time there's a full moon, that would be way too expensive and you'd be well within your rights as a consumer to spend your money on something else. As far as I'm aware, Apple will not force you to subscribe to any apps. 2) "... subscriptions are immoral..." Bullshit. A…

Subscriptions are immoral, but not for those reasons. It's an immoral business model because its success is based on bilking people -- cheating them into paying for 'service' when they don't want to. The mechanism is simple: the slight inconvenience of cancellation prevents a huge number of users from cancelling as soon as they want to. This is why getting your customers to set up automated and recurring payments is…

Quite obviously biased and overstated. Many subscription models have nothing to do with tricking people or making it hard to cancel and many customers of those continue to pay knowingly and willingly and appreciate the convenience of agreeing to this up-front instead of manually renewing multiple services each month. For example, my water provider. My Netflix subscription. You cannot just ignore this because it doesn't fit your model. The immorality is the trickery, not the subscription.
Post reply on HN