Oops! This post is long. Sorry about that. :) Great little discussion.
DF posted a followup, called “App Store Subscription Uncertainty”: http://daringfireball.net/2016/06/app_store_subscription_uncertainty The linked Apple guidelines make it pretty clear that this is about actual, material, subscribe-worthy things, like services or new content. As you can see from the piece, this is making developers—who, as Donna rightly points out, are itching for the perfect back-rub—rather uncomfortable. Here’s my position: it may be isolationist in the view of the trust others put in to it, but the cloud is ultimately a dependency. It’s not as obviously brittle as the mainframe, but yes, it means you need access to the cloud, and if it fails for any reason, as it can (the recent news about the Sydney AWS failure is a perfect illustration of this), then you’re SOL. This could be anything from a service outage to a change of business relationships to a falling out with the vendor; it means you seed control of your software to some outside party. I’m just not happy with that arrangement. I have an Office sub for personal use, but I’m more interested in the 1 TB of storage than the software. Now, as people are saying here, both Microsoft and Adobe are making money hand over fist by getting people to pay more long-term, just like mobile phone contracts. This works, until you lose access to the software you’re perfectly fine with using, and or just don’t see any need of upgrades that are worth paying for. My hope is that Apple pretty clearly makes this subscription model a choice, and provides the enforcement necessary to stop the market dissolving into an exclusively subscriber arena. I’m just not interested in that, and for the reasons mostly already put forward here. If everybody gets the idea that you’ll pay a little here, a little there to keep their updates coming in, when the practical consequence of that is lots of subscriptions that are mostly paid out on a habitual rather than beneficial basis, then we’re going to have developers raking it in for doing little work and no incentive structure to do better. The correct solution, one that doesn’t make quite so much money for Apple, but the right solution nevertheless, is to provide proper support for trials and major release upgrades; then people would get what they actually paid for. Subscriptions just aren’t the instrument for that, and the cynic in me says that Apple are well aware of that. It also helps that we don’t yet know what happens, exactly, if you “run out” of your subscription and don’t pay for the next instalment; if you lose everything, as I’m pretty sure you will, then the subscription ultimately amounts to a racket for any software with no incremental component. Finally, I’d like to draw one positive out of all this: the incentive for quality. Notice here that Apple will surrender some of those precious margins for sticky apps. Maybe, just maybe, better, deeper, quality apps will come out of this. Let’s face it, the marketplace is constrained by the impulse-buy price structures. As CB and others say, it could mean a lot if the cost of software over many years, with genuine upgrade pricing that worked in this new subscription model, and paid for by willing purchasers on an ongoing basis, could actually be accommodated. I don’t think Adobe or Microsoft qualify; they’re only making it work because they are the top in their respective markets. But apps with plenty of forward progress potential with new features appearing on a regular basis that are above and beyond mere feature enhancements or bug fixes could make it work. For those vitally important apps, I’d happily pay a little per year to cover the cost of ongoing development, especially if it means Apple will let them claw back more of their earnings. There’s nothing to add concerning ads: it’s just going to be a slide to the bottom, paid for by the parasites at the top, as usual. Wish Apple would get its own bottom in order and have a search function that worked. But at least it’s limited to the US, for now. And I didn’t see any mention concerning the Mac App Store. That’s just the same, as always, and I don’t suppose it’ll change. I could be wrong though—in some ways I hope I am. It’d mean actual progress on that poor, beleaguered place. Message ends. :) -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at [email protected] The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
