Yes, exactly. I want to choose if I want to upgrade, and to keep using the old version if I decide against, just like every other piece of software has worked since the beginning of time.
Who gives a shit about their purchase history or whatever? The developer can just edit the description for old versions to say “DO NOT BUY THIS, IT’S OLD, AND IT ONLY EXISTS FOR UPGRADE PRICING” in all caps.
And every year you remove the n-2 version from the appstore anyway. You only offer upgrade pricing from last year’s version. Skip an upgrade in 2020, and you pay full price in 2021.
I do not want a version of, say, Ulysses for every paid update showing up in my purchase history when I got to re-download it. Because unless Apple removed the app via a ban, I can still re-download all the old versions of an app.
I have three Tweetbots. I don’t want three. I don’t want this problem to scale up and every app developer doing this. Even if I can hide them, I don’t want to that overhead.
A better option would be to lock new features into an iAP. I don’t know how well that works if the new features require the new version of iOS, but the app is still flagged as working with the previous year.
But all this discussion does is show there isn’t a great solution that makes people happy. Every solution is going to piss of a non-minority of users.
What overhead, exactly? You just don’t like the idea of old listings being there? Is it a religious objection of some kind?
Locking new features behind an IAP would work too, sure. Fantastical 3 actually already does that-- you get all the FC2 features unlocked if it’s on your account, then you have to pay to get the new ones.
This is somewhat rich given your hardline stance on subscriptions. :)
Sometimes, I do a clean reinstall without going to backup. When I go to Tweetbot, I have three versions and it shows (I think) the date I got it. So, I download the that one that says 2015. But that doesn’t feel like the new version.
Drafts handled it well, labeling the old one “Drafts (legacy version)”. For 2-3 apps, it’s not a big deal, but if everyone went to that, I wouldn’t be thrilled.
Jason Snell also mentioned that creating a new app resets the search criteria, etc.
This whole thing is just a mess that Apple made, really.
My stance on subscriptions is essentially a religious objection. I view them as abhorrent as similarly taboo actions like incest. It’s analogous to tongue-kissing my grandpa.
Completely agree it’s Apple’s fault. That said, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck app subscriptions.
If I made a productivity-style app for the iPad, given the shitty options, a subscription model is the one I’d choose. I’d probably also charge $40 a year for it. My thinking is a smaller user base, who will pay more per person, is an easier support model than a lot of people who will pay a little. I’d rather support one person paying $40 a year than 4 people paying $10 a year.
They do though. Adobe owns the creative market, and Microsoft owns the business model. Sure, there are apps like Affinity that are chipping away at Photoshop, but those are the small-change users. The solo designers or small shops. The big shops are all still on Adobe. The people complaining about Adobe’s pricing are usually the hobbyists. The truly pro photogs I know shrug off the price because they’ve billed that out for the month by lunch on day one.
Office is still the primary office suite. Apple’s iWork apps still suck compared to it (except for Keynote). The .docx and xls formats are the predominant file formats for work documents.
Yeah, Adobe’s revenues soared when they got people off the version of Photoshop they were using for 5 years because they didn’t want to pay $400 or so every year into a $120/year sub model. Plus the ad agencies getting the full suite of products.
There is also a better support model with them too.
Photoshop is definitely still on top, but Google Docs is real competition for MS Office.
Not that any of that matters, because neither image editing nor word processing are platforms. Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android are the platforms relevant today. Of the four, only iOS is locked-down.
So basically a $15/year subscription. I think your concern is just cost. A $40/year subscription is roughly equivalent to a $100 one-time purchase (about the ratio used by OmniFocus for Web and Office 365, anyway.)
I just ran a query on our player data. In the past 24 hours, we’ve had Android players on over 24,000 unique combinations of device hardware and Android OS.
It’s much much much much much easier to debug and provide support on iOS. Plus, we don’t spend hours chasing down fraud, sideloaded malware, etc., which we have to do on Android.
I get that people don’t like that Apple is “locked down,” but the reality is that the Android ecosystem is a dumpster fire if you’re distributing apps on a global scale. This morning, I had to look to see how many players we would lose if we upgraded to Unity 2019, which only supports Android 9+. Turns out that we would lose about 75% of our players, so, we’re stuck with old Unity and end up having to purchase the source code and fix bugs in it ourself. Supporting Android is a huge drain.
Maybe with some consumers, who probably weren’t paying for Office anyway, but MS is still killing it with Office 365. They keeps adding more and more subscribers.
It’s incredibly easy to get around, to the point I had forgotten about it. It’s more for their less technical users, who probably aren’t buying software anyway. Heck, judging by my family, it’s a very good idea. (My nephew got ransomeware last year.)
macOS isn’t locked down, it just has an option to lock it down.
