![]() ![]() Sure, the built-in apps may not be insanely great for all people. ![]() Most of the stuff the average person needs a computer for is covered by the platform’s built-in app suite. Browser? Built in, with lots of great free alternatives available (don’t forget that Netscape used to be a paid product!). It was implicitly understood that software costs money, and that you probably needed a fair bit of it to do your work.įast-forward to today. Wash/rinse/repeat for just about anything you actually wanted to do with your computer, including programming the computer. Want to track appointments? You need to buy calendar software. Oh, you want a word processor? You need to buy (Works / Word / WordPerfect / Claris / etc.). I agree that markets aren’t fixed, and can definitely be expanded.īut by the same token, I would argue that the proliferation of current-generation smartphones has once again contracted many markets in many ways, even as smartphones achieve ubiquity. But I think there has been a real structural change in the market as well.ĭoesn’t this assume that the Dev has a large percentage of the total addressable market? Also, markets aren’t fixed, and can absolutely be expanded. Devs might be greedy, or bloated or lazy or whatever. I don’t pretend this is the only dynamic at play. (The iOS equivalent of an upgrade is to release new app, which seems to be more confusing or leads to less uptake than a more traditional upgrade path, or I’d guess we’d see more of it.) That leaves us with stale apps, abandonware, or subscription conversions. Otherwise there simply isn’t enough revenue (new sales) coming in to pay for servers and/or development. Once the economics depend on continuing customers rather than new customers, devs need either an upgrade pricing model or a subscription model. I think there is one reason things really are different now than in the earlier days of the App Store, and in the days of the Mac before the iPhone: saturation.Īs long as the iPhone market was expanding, selling a fixed price app with ongoing costs and new features was reasonable: Even if only one in 1,000 new customers bought your app, you had thousands of potential news customers all the time.Īs sales of new devices (not replacements!) leveled off, that universe of potential new customers shrinks. But yes, the market will probably regulate itself… Maybe you are right, maybe it is an inevitable future and being nostalgic is just silly.īut I think there is a line between honestly providing a constant service to the customer that needs a subscription to work and money grabbing and I’m having the feeling that some players are overdoing it right now. And its main selling point is the one time purchase. I wouldn’t call Serif (Affinity) a small company. We can complain about it but all we can do is choose another app, if one is available, without a subscription. Whatever the reason that iOS/iPadOS software subscriptions are continuing to grow, it is happening. And many companies don’t allow key people to travel in the same vehicle for obvious reasons. For example the loss of a single employee to can be devastating. Small companies can be more flexible but also more vulnerable. Yes some small companies “can survive by selling a good product without subs”. Some of them come with way more complexity than a simple calendar app where the devs don’t know what features they should cram into it next to make the subscription worthwhile. I was too lazy to lookup the company names but I guess the app names are known better anyways. Affinity Suite, Pixelmator, Scrivener, Forklift, Daisy Disk, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel,… to name a few. There are a lot of companies who still can survive by selling a good product without subs. While they are in a death circle of iterations of the same game adding features no one wants or needs or likes. Look at computer games: Every big studio looked in complete jealousy at the Minecraft dev who did it alone. It seemed to work back in the 90s, it seems to work nowadays. Just don’t be greedy, keep it clean, not cluttered and make a next version every couple of years. Unfortunately, AFAIK, iOS developers still can’t do that.Ĭultured Code (Things 3) has no problem with this kind of way. BBEdit has been around for decades and from time to time offers paid upgrades of their products. Of course developers can develop new features. ![]()
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