As if „deploying“ your app to your iPhone was free…
AI is going to kill app subscriptions
231–240 of 250 posts
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#232> If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free. There are free PDF editors, but that hasn't changed the fact people pay for them. I don't think this is going to work out like the article thinks it is, unless AI is really easy to use, and does a very good job, but there's always going to be that last 5% of quality that people will…
Free sites steal your data. Besides people don't care about the tool, they care about the result. People don't want a faster horse. I strongly believe that this will democratize "doing things" with computers where the tool doesn't matter anymore.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#233> If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free. There are free PDF editors, but that hasn't changed the fact people pay for them. I don't think this is going to work out like the article thinks it is, unless AI is really easy to use, and does a very good job, but there's always going to be that last 5% of quality that people will…
Same goes for Docusign - many competitors exist but the reason Docusign is still popular is because they own the verb and "trust" of the general population.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#234I mean a 10 / month pdf editor sounds like an outrageously bad deal… that’s 120 a year so good riddance But if people want to make more good creative games and the store helps me find them I have plenty more money to shovel at them
Look at bluebeam revu for a good pdf editor. Pdf editing is harder than it looks
Nope I'll make a google doc and export to PDF I think.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#235Subscription is not about app ownership, but mostly running the infra. AI is going to make basically everything even more expensive and subscription based. Your point is based on wrong assumptions.
That is an underappreciated point. Wrappers around LLMs are _many_ magnitudes more expensive to run than current SaaS apps.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#236Competition is absolutely going to crush the concept of mooching off a simple app costing $6/week or $10/month, but it doesn't matter where that competition comes from the problem is a guitar tuner shouldn't cost $100/year, it was always artificially successful derived from preventing users any other way to get apps. If AI doesn't kill this it will be 3rd party marketplaces or open source app distribution that does i…
I' not sure for the reason that for every one of the successful subscription apps there were dozens of free or nearly free competitors. The app stores have been awash with wannabe clones from the start.
Yeah but virtually all customer acquisition comes from either being featured or paying for ads both of which favour subscription apps over free/nearly-free.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#237I just did this at work, I was working with Postman testing an API and wanted it work in a slightly different way and be able to do some bulk testing, saving responses, all slightly different then how Postman worked. I clone just the features I wanted in about 15 minutes and now have my own API test tool that works exactly how I want. It is not something I would ever release or need to share, just a local tool for me…
You mean postman the curl frontend with a lot of bloat and an account + price tag? Not really the example of a very valuable app to begin with.
Exactly. I never saw a reason for that to be a paid service in the first place.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Google sells the productivity apps and also does the exact same things OpenAI does. If their work on Gemini is this leading world-class stuff, why aren’t Google’s software products not suddenly becoming better? Was the most recent release of Android demonstrative of a significant uptick in product iteration? Shouldn’t we suddenly be seeing Android pulling far ahead of iOS in an unusually rapid fashion because App…
Android is a poor example here especially with how more and more features are moved from the OS to Play services. Google is shipping so many features without even an OS update that's how Android has always been. Even for their OS, Pixel feature drops happen every quarter. AOSP is only a base for others to build anyway, have you seen how fast samsung and others are pushing updates and uncountable number of features. I…
Okay, I agree with your premise, but can you point to some tangible acceleration in innovation.
Are these Google Play features coming out faster than they used to in a way that coincides with AI adoption?
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some things are just not suited to an app. It's still easier to jot down a shopping list on a piece of paper than to use an app and a janky mobile phone keyboard. And bonus, nobody gets to sell your shopping preferences or blast you with ads as you're trying to use it!
I spent years trying to find the PERFECT pantry tracking, auto shopping list generating, auto "what can I make tonight with what I have", auto meal preping app. The idea seemed so simple in mind back then. Let me input everything I have, then as I pull ingredients out of the fridge I just "decrease eggs by 3, decrease butter by 1tbsp, decrease bacon by 2 slices" then over time, it will just build my shopping list for…
I do hear what you're saying, and I've wrestled with "not everything should / can be an app". That being said, I'm still trying to solve food (for myself) with computers, haha.
Right now, that looks like trying to create a nutritionally-optimal "dog food for humans", using combinatorial optimization solvers. I think I'm going to write something up as a post when it becomes a bit more feature-complete.
It's living at chow.seanjohnsen.com if you're curious! Would love feedback from someone who has thought along these lines.
Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions
#240Simple takes are never correct. Just like the radiologists example has been proven wrong.
This place is the worst at this too. I get you guys are very involved in writing code that is central to the existence of a software product - but you are not a product designer nor manager. Meaning you dont get people and how they view their choice set and more importantly how they make decisions.
For if you did.. you'd all be shipping your own products and highly successful. But most of you are not shipping your own products with large success behind it. So quit the crap.