> Have users pay upfront or pay a subscription. This was how the app stores started and it quickly turned into a race to the bottom for free apps. The market had spoken.
The problem is that the App Store model fails at the commodity stage.
The first stage for an application is that you invented it and no one else has it, so you make a lot of money from the monopoly for a while and recover your initial investment.
Then competitors show up. They're not as good, but they charge less money, so they capture most of the market. So instead of the high quality seller having a hundred million customers at $1, the low quality seller has a billion customers at $0 and the high quality seller is left with half a million customers at $1. And then they go out of business.
This is the worst stage for software, because proprietary-but-free software is terrible. The proprietors don't have the resources to make it great but the users don't have the ownership to improve it themselves, so it's low quality or abusive or both.
The problem is the App Store leaves everything at that stage, when the natural evolution after that point is for proprietary freeware to be replaced by open source alternatives. Because the App Store doesn't make it easy for the minority of users with the technical skill to make minor improvements to the apps they use to do that (and ultimately push the changes upstream), which over time is how GNU/Linux gets good enough to replace proprietary Unix and so on.
So once there is aggressive competition in a space, we end up with spam-laden free-as-in-beer spyware forever instead of making the transition to free-as-in-speech apps that don't abuse the users because if they did the users would just strip out the abusive parts.