I did pick up GoodNotes with their sale.
This “complete my bundle” pricing is weird:
I bought notability like 10 years ago. I never really used it much, but if I had, they certainly were due more revenue from me. But of course I will never subscribe to an app, so they would have lost me just like tweetbot and every other major app that went subscription.
Subscribing to apps is bullshit. Services are fine, apps are not. Developers should release new versions every so often and charge a discounted upgrade fee. The difference there being if you decide not to pay, you can continue using the old version.
Or you can just use OneNote for free.
Unfortunately, as we’ve discussed, Apple made this functionally impossible by disallowing upgrades. For a while, devs tried doing a “complete a package” thing but it didn’t work and they ended up with multiples of MyApp in the store.
I think most devs would prefer this route by far.
There is another way though. Apps like Agenda do a one time charge or sub. If you do the one time you get 12 months of feature updates and then can pay again if you want to get latter updates. Or you can subscribe. It’s been a great alternative in my experience.
Yes there are ways around it even inside some Apple’s walls. And soon you’ll be able to do payments outside the app store anyway.
They are providing a bit of a service for the subscription now: the gallery. But it’s like Fantastical in that it’s a marginal new service feature and you’re mostly paying $X/year for the app itself.
Also I think it’s cool that they’re making it free for K-12 now.
That said, GoodNotes is the way forward for me if/when my one-time Notability payment stops being enough for what I want to do on my iPad.
Like 20+ of my top-rated iOS games I bought in purchase history have changed to a subscription model the fuckers.
Classic iOS titles that aren’t live services like Puzzlejuice and Space Miner.