An engineer with an app can come to work 365 days a year, fix bugs, add nice new features, unbreak the app every time iOS updates, and, though you use the app every day, they can't count on you to give them another $5 every year - or ever again - unless you enter into a subscription.
This isn't to say you have some obligation to do a subscription to any app you don't think is worth it, but for apps from non-scam developers, they're usually like $20 or less a year - about a nickel a day. A nickel is 3¢ in year-2000 dollars btw.
It's on the developer to prove to you that the app is worth paying a nickel a day to have! But ruling it out just because we wish it didn't have to be, well, that just rewards the developers who monetize exclusively with ads or sell their 'free' apps to sketchy operators.
I'd like it if Uber was free or just cost a buck a ride flat rate, but I know that anyone willing to give me a ride on terms like that is probably looking to rob me.
After a year, I don't think anyone is bothered if an app becomes unsupported for whatever reason. Usually what happens is the opposite - developer unnecessarily cripples an existing, perfectly working app, to try to milk some more revenue out of it.
This is an especially moot point now that most platform API upgrades are $1 of LLM work away.
I was just listing one more thing a developer who wasn't slacking might spend his time doing, that's all.
> Keeping the app compatible with new OS releases is necessary to keep sales going.
Relying on constant sales to new users sounds like a pyramid scheme. Software licenses don't wear out like shoes or become consumed like butter, with happy customers returning to buy more. Eventually, most of the people that need most apps have bought it and sales don't "keep going" more than a trickle, except for apps that are such mainstream hits that your new users are just "everyone who became old enough this month to get their first phone." And because the App Store has ruined organic discovery, paid apps rely almost exclusively on paying for installs either via Apple's ads or elsewhere. So, that eats a good part of each new sale's revenue right away.
Check the iOS top charts right now. For paid apps, the top-selling app is Shadowrocket, a rule-based proxy utility. How long until all developers who want a rule-based proxy utility have already paid the $3? If 100,000 developers buy that app, then that developer nets $210,000 pre-income-tax. About on par with a good corporate SWE job outside of FAANG. But that will slow down. There just aren't that many people who are looking for that. #2 is just a client of a subscription service for businesses. #3 is AnkiMobile Flashcards at $25. See, at that price I agree it can afford to never charge again. #4 is an ephemeral app for some art event in Portland so it doesn't need to be sustained. #5 is Procreate Pocket. I guess there are enough new aspiring artists appearing every day who can afford these apps (I think it's $13 for iPad).
> After a year, I don't think anyone is bothered if an app becomes unsupported for whatever reason.
Okay, so subscribe to the apps you use, and then immediately go in and turn off renewal in Settings -> (your Apple ID) -> Subscriptions. There. You now have a one-time purchase of an app which will stop working in a year - just like apps that have no recurring revenue stream do.
> This is an especially moot point now that most platform API upgrades are $1 of LLM work away.
I don't think you are a developer of serious iOS apps. Just the visual changes, that users expect apps to go along with, require major redesigns. People don't buy apps that look like they were designed in 2019.
It's not the amount of the payment. It's the subscription model I can't stand. You're correct that I might use an app I like every day. But the marginal cost to the developer of me using it every day is $0. Rather than belabor the restaurant example , consider a book or a music CD. Writing books or recording music is generally a slow and difficult process, it takes months to produce one that might be read in a weekend. But if you buy a book, you can read or refer to it every day without paying again, or you cna listen to your favorite songs as often as you like by playing the CD. Nowadays many people prefer to stream music, but I think when people buy a book (even an e-book), they consider that it's their copy to read as often as they want...
...or not. If I buy a book and I don't like it, or later I find another book that I turn out to prefer to the first one, I can just not read it again. I don't have to cancel a subscription for the book.
It aligns your incentives with the developer very well. They really want you to not cancel your subscription after only paying the first year's payment (when you may not have even paid back the customer acquisition cost!), and you want the app to be high quality and well-maintained. If the developer doesn't meet your bar for that, you cancel the subscription with 4 taps and they lose future income. That incentive to please customers after the sale just doesn't exist in a pay-once app world (except in tiny niches of old-school developers, like the Panics of the world, whom I do greatly respect).
Besides the incentives, it also gives you a chance to, after that one-year $7 spend, re-evaluate "do I even use this anymore?" If you paid for a guitar tuning app and you stopped playing guitar, you can just cancel the subscription, even before you've paid the amount that they'd have priced it for one-time-purchase. There is upside for the consumer in the apps that either let you down, or that you simply realized you no longer need, and it lowers the risk bar to try an app that you aren't sure about.
I get that if you do end up using such an app for the next 15 years, yes you'll probably pay somewhat more than any price you'd have considered paying one-off, but it also probably means that app (an app you use often for decades) couldn't have been sustained for all that time with only new customer installs paying the bills.
> if you buy a book, you can read or refer to it every day without paying again, or you cna listen to your favorite songs as often as you like by playing the CD.
We agree that this is all very great. And since the music or book you buy carries zero support burden of any kind from the artist it's a pretty great model - after their album launches the artist can devote 100% of their bandwidth to producing new music, or they can tour to get recurring income out of the same music, or a mix of the two.
If you paid for it once and only got to keep the version of it as of when you paid for it, in a couple years the platform would remove your ability to use it.
Don't want new features, and don't need an upgrade then stick with it. If you need the new version, then pay a partial amount of the app for the upgrade?
No, they do not. And they actively pitch developers on adding subscriptions instead.
So, in the old days, you paid often $50-500 for a piece of software and the developer would usually have zero burden to update the software for you. By the time the OS completely broke it, it would have been 5+ years later. All that time, the developer was freed up to build and sell whole other applications, or, to innovate new and compelling features to get you to pay the upgrade price to get a new version.
Today that developer would have to do 5 major updates with breaking API changes, and probably at least 1 full visual refresh just to keep up with Apple's changing design whims, just for that one app to not be bricked. They have less bandwidth then to build more apps, since each app carries its own annual burden of churn.