I was going to say the same thing, but my fingers were to tired for all
that, so I'll just say I agree.
Here is the downside scenario. Say somebody puts out a nice app such as
an audio cleaner. I rent the app and use it to clean all my cassette and
LP record transfers to remove hiss and pops. Great! But what if I stop
paying/don't renew. A couple scenarios, in order of badness:
1. The app goes poof and I can't clean anymore audio, but I still have
all my existing cleaned audio.
2. The app goes poof, I still have cleaned audio files but it's in
"super scrub deluxe" format which I can't play unless I jump through
some terminal hacks to install rogue software from some site in Russia.
3. The app goes poof and takes my files with it, either deleting them or
they were on some cloud service that I now do not have access to.
In the old setup I pay once and can keep using app and my files forever,
or at least until some OS upgrade breaks it.
Couple other variations are possible. Back in the day they used to call
it Technology Lock-in and you were trapped in the Apple or Microsoft
(VMS? CMP?) ecosphere. Mac was a little better because its small market
share required it to play chameleon to work with the other platform. So
what happens if my app provider does the same lock-in? My audio scrubber
works fine but they haven't updated it in months. Do I keep on paying
just to have it around?
As the developer I'd be happy because people would have to keep paying
me for the privileged of using my novel app, which I've copyrighted,
trademarked and patented like crazy.
CB
On 6/9/16 4:11 PM, Sabahattin Gucukoglu wrote:
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. :)
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¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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