What is the most useless app that you have seen being given as a subscription?
For me, I tried a ‘minimalist’ launcher app for Android that had a 7 day trial or something and they had a yearly subscription based model for it. I was aghast. I would literally expect the app to blow my mind and do everything one can assume to go that way. In a world, where Nova Launcher (Yes, I know it has been acquired by Branch folks but it still is a sturdy one) or Niagara exist plus many alternatives including minimalist ones on F Droid, the dev must be releasing revolutionary stuff to factor in a subscription service.
Second, is a controversial choice, since it’s free tier is quite good and people like it so much. But, Pocketcasts. I checked it’s yearly price the other day, and boy, in my country, I can subscribe to Google Play Pass, YouTube Premium and Spotify and still have money left before I hit the ceiling what Pocketcasts is asking for paid upgrade.
Also, what are your views on one time purchase vs subscriptions? Personally, I find it much easier to purchase, if it’s good enough even if it was piratable, something if it is a one time purchase rather than repetitive.
The problem with one time purchases is that you might be investing time in an app that later will go out of business. Keeping an app up to date requires real constant work, before you even think of adding features and fixing bugs. People got used to paying 2 bucks for an app and keep it forever. That’s completely unsustainable.
On the flip side, this is one of the reasons open source projects can be really great. When a community of people can contribute to something to make it better over time and when people can fix their own problems with an app you can get something really great that can get updates sustainably without a subscription model… Everybody just kind of contributes what they can to get what they want. Of course, maintaining an open source project is work and has its own problems and volunteer contributions aren’t necessarily sustainable either and aren’t great for large chunks of work… But there is something nice about the model of “everybody contributes to this thing a little to make something better than we’d be able to make on our own,” even if that’s a bit idealistic in practice, haha.
On the high end, dealing with the Kafkaesque whims of the App and Play stores randomly deciding to nuke your app (and thus business) from orbit as an “oopsie”
It’s not like the entire foundation of software and computing and essentially all of Silicon Valley was built upon a non-subscription model. It’s completely unsustainable.
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The problem with one time purchases is that you might be investing time in an app that later will go out of business. Keeping an app up to date requires real constant work, before you even think of adding features and fixing bugs. People got used to paying 2 bucks for an app and keep it forever. That’s completely unsustainable.
But yeah, sure, some companies push it.
On the flip side, this is one of the reasons open source projects can be really great. When a community of people can contribute to something to make it better over time and when people can fix their own problems with an app you can get something really great that can get updates sustainably without a subscription model… Everybody just kind of contributes what they can to get what they want. Of course, maintaining an open source project is work and has its own problems and volunteer contributions aren’t necessarily sustainable either and aren’t great for large chunks of work… But there is something nice about the model of “everybody contributes to this thing a little to make something better than we’d be able to make on our own,” even if that’s a bit idealistic in practice, haha.
Yeah, so many really nice apps that were abandoned since the 99 cent app doesn’t pay the development bills.
I don’t know much about app design so what work does it take to keep an app up to date and is it possible just to not update it?
On the low end, yearly OS upgrade compliance.
On the high end, dealing with the Kafkaesque whims of the App and Play stores randomly deciding to nuke your app (and thus business) from orbit as an “oopsie”
It’s not like the entire foundation of software and computing and essentially all of Silicon Valley was built upon a non-subscription model. It’s completely unsustainable.
It was built on yearly releases of software instead, also known as yearly subscriptions.