Yep, 25 euros a year for a goddamn app is ridiculous.
It's the same price as a nice physical agenda, that needs all kinds of production and supply chain wizardry.
Mobile devs are out of their minds nowadays. No that it matters that much because those phone apps end up being largely pointless most of the time (hence the absurdity of the high price).
Sounds good, doesn't work. How would I sell a major version on a store like the Apple or Google app stores [0]? How will I fund my salary as well as my employees' salaries from only major versions, what if people buy now but not later on, do I lay them off? For what it's worth I do offer lifetime plans that are basically 2 to 3 years of the annual plan, as that's the expected lifetime value (LTV) of some of my apps.
There used to be a lot less expectation of post-sale maintenance of consumer software in the era where sales rather than subscriptions were the norm. There was also tolerance for higher up-front prices, and for much of that period sales depended on marketing through and validation by a narrow set of relatively trusted discovery channels, which customer the perceived risk to buyers. Now everything is untrusted, no one wants to pay much upfront but everyone expects ongoing support over they've got the thing. I’m not saying subscription is the only thing that works, but it's pretty easy to see that the calculus facing the average vendor has shifted tremendously over time.
fwiw the expectation of post-sale maintenance would not be nearly as egregious if companies were not regularly pushing new updates that cause new issues
Well, on mobile the underlying operating system is moving so fast that companies must continue to update their apps or else they stop working. It's the absolute inverse situation to the backwards compatibility story of Windows. That kind of backwards compatibility is a wet dream for every mobile developer.
I don't believe this is generally true. I have automatic updates for apps disabled on both my Android phones and iOS devices, and regularly use some apps that were installed years ago.
There are obviously going to be some exceptions for apps that rely on specific types of system services, of course.
You're not the average user if you have auto updates disabled. Notice you also said "some" apps, well, most do need to keep up with OS updates or fall behind.
I did not claim to be the average user. Most of my apps do not get updated unless they rely on APIs that force them to update. Furthermore, I have several android apps I published over 15 years ago that still function without updates on the newest version of Android.
What updates do you think need to be made to not “fall behind”? There aren’t many other than things like integration with Google Play services or App Store subscription billing.
It's a bunch of things. In the old days, if you bought software in a box for your OS (let's say DOS), you didn't expect it to need to be updated. It also continued to work just fine and maybe you didn't update your OS that frequently or had security issues to worry about. Nowadays, iOS gets updated every year and APIs get deprecated, and users update, so you have to maintain the app after initially shipping it.
A lot of people also expect the software to add features over time. In the old days, you'd ship a brand new major version and charge people for that and stop working on the old one. With the App Store, I suppose you could technically abandon the old version and sell a whole new version, but then all your old users will be annoyed if the app is removed from the store or no longer works when they update their OS. You could gate new features behind a paywall, and I know some apps do this, but then it adds to the complexity of the app as you have to worry about features that work for some users but not others.
I think people also expect software nowadays to be cheap or free, I think due to large corporations being able to fund free stuff (say gmail) by other means (say ads or tracking users). That means users would balk if you asked them to pay $50 for your little calendar app, so if you did ask for a one-time payment, it would be $5-$10, which is nowhere near enough to recoup whatever time you spent, unless you hit it big. Hitting it big nowadays with an app is difficult since there's so much competition in the App Stores and everyone has raced to the bottom to sell apps for pennies.
Actually people don't expect it to be updated in most cases. In fact, Apple is generally forcing their hands with constant nagging to update and the psychologically taxing red notification dot that people do not know how to get rid of.
Most people would be just fine buying a phone as it is and using it as is for the rest of it's useful life.
But they can't, because Apple came with a clever marketing trick to make things easier for them: "free" updates for everyone.
This way they get to keep working only on one OS version, deprecated stuff aggressively and largely no need to care about security patching stuff after a few years.
If you are in the "ecosystem" they will force you to upgrade your OSs to be in sync if you dare use one of their apps since they are tied to OS release (dumbest things ever, but of course it's on purpose).
That's fine, people like you aren't my customer anyway and thus do not need to be listened to. Free users generally have value if they can convert to paid, because nothing is truly free in life.
