Matt Birchler
Lots of comments recently on my channel from people immediately NOPEing on an app with a subscription.
I'm starting to feel like the App Store wrecked people's expectations for what software they can use with basically zero cost. When everything was like $1-5, you could buy every single cool app that people talked about, and not really feel the pain.
Downside is most companies could not sustain themselves on that little revenue, so many didn't make it.
Paul Cantrell
@schwa @sandofsky @nicklockwood @gruber @matt
I worked in mobile app dev in the pre-iPhone J2ME days. I remember when the iPhone App Store opened, the director of marketing was just tied in •knots• over the “pay once, no subscriptions“ model at the time. She couldn’t quite bring herself to say “our business model is built on utterly inactive users who forgot our app even exists not realizing our monthly fee is still buried in their carrier bill,” but that was the simple truth of it.
Jonathan Wight
@sandofsky @nicklockwood @gruber @matt when i want to try an app i don’t want to be immediately be forced to make a subscription and then deal with either having to remember to unsubscribe or immediately digging 5 layers deep into Sys Prefs to manage my subscriptions.
Complaining that users are cheap totally misrepresents the fact that subscriptions are horrible for users as currently implemented.
Jonathan Wight
@sandofsky @nicklockwood @gruber @matt the current apple subscription model is user hostile.
It’s too easy to be ripped off by unscrupulous developers. It’s too difficult to manage subscriptions. It’s too easy to forget to cancel an app you don’t use.
Every app nickel and diming subscriptions imposes a huge burden onto the users.
It’s not that I don’t like paying for software. It’s that I don’t like paying for software I am not using.
Nick Lockwood
@gruber @matt you can placate us pretty easily by just offering a one-off lifetime purchase option (alongside subscriptions) at a price that you've calculated to match the average subscription lifespan (probably 2-3 years).
People who are actually serious about not wanting to pay rent for software (and not just cheap-asses) will happily pay a one-off fee of $50-75 for a quality app, and even if that's only a tiny %, it gives you something you can point at to shut up the others.
sandofsky
@nicklockwood @gruber @matt this largely worked for us, but there are still people who complain that it’s too expensive. They think software should cost between $0 and $5, no matter what. Part of it is Apple’s fault, and part of it is a decade of VC subsidized apps.
I’d love to see these people’s reaction to the price of shrinkwrapped software 20 years ago.
John Gruber
@matt I understand the nope-to-subs perspective, but they are out of touch with reality. There’s no other sustainable way to create commercial indie software for iOS. It’s either subs or free hobbyware.
Also, while the anti-substers are very vocal, in my opinion they’re a vocal minority of zealots. Developers should ignore them, not placate them.
Jonathan Wight
@inthehands @sandofsky @nicklockwood @gruber @matt it’s literally the gym membership model.
And everyone loooooves paying that
Paul Cantrell
@schwa @sandofsky @nicklockwood @gruber @matt
It’s worse. Like…your if gym membership were hidden in your power bill, and 50% of your users forgot where the gym is, or that it exists.
At the time, app vendors were utterly at the mercy of phone carriers. Carriers would auction off top slots in app list for new phone setup. That was the whole game right there. You don’t even bother advertising. Capture users on setup, they forget you exist, you bill them forever.
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