As someone who bought Clear I fully disagree with the premise of this post. All they had to do was recompile the app and potentially fix a few small bugs. You can't sit there and act like it was some monumental change that warranted screwing over your existing users. If they are unhappy with how much money they are making then they simply need to raise their prices.
Unless you were the person who works at Realmac, and personally performed the iOS 7 update, I'm not sure how you can possibly say something like this. I didn't do it either, so it might be that you're correct. The notion that asking someone to pay for your work is "screwing over your existing users", is exactly the problem that is being discussed. Personally I don't think that it's that strange to ask people to give you a few dollars so that it is worth your time to keep working on things for them. But hey that's just me.
Your final point shows that you either didn't read the article, or you didn't read the first sentence that you wrote. If Realmac ups their prices because they are unhappy with the money they are making, then everyone (including you since you feel entitled to free upgrades for life) will just leave.
>All they had to do was recompile the app and potentially fix a few small bugs.
That's all they had to do eh. It's all so simple.
>If they are unhappy with how much money they are making then they simply need to raise their prices.
Haha. Or charge for upgrades?
The 99c app business, is shit-business. I feel for app developers. You can't build a company around that price point. Either you charge more or you go down the recurring revenue model. Neither is easy. If you're a game developer you go freemium, and you try to squeeze as much revenue out of your customer base.
Actually, there are many people (me included) who don't mind paying 10$ for a game, but avoid freemium games like the plague. So there is a psychological difference between raising up-front prices and upgrade pricing, even if I spend the same money in the end.
I hear ya. My first experience with freemium was TF2 and I was a fan. I thought Valve made it work. The game was great. You can choose to pay for hats and upgrades but if you didn't, it's still super fun. It doesn't take that long to find some cool weapons and gear, and it doesn't take that long to craft or trade for anything you need. I've actually put in around $20-30 because I just wanted Valve to have some money, given the amount of enjoyment I got out of the game.
The problem is that freemium no longer works like this. Instead of it being a business model ("this is how we sell our game"), it's a core aspect of the game. Instead of designing a game to maximize fun, the gameplay is designed to suck out as much money from the customer as possible. I loved the original PvZ. It was a fun game, with fun challenges and I got tons of hours of enjoyment. I downloaded the freemium update (not even PvZ 2, but an update to the original), and now it's all repetitive grind in order to get you to the point where you'll use your credit card to skip over the purposely tedious parts. Who designs a game to be purposely tedious!! Freemium devs do, that's who. It's insane! Shit. What a terrible genre. It should die in a fire.
>So there is a psychological difference between raising up-front prices and upgrade pricing
I know. That sucks. The reality may be that freemium is the only way you can make money from the app store. The typical app store price-points (99c - 4.99$) are not enough to make any sort of money and to build companies around. And for some reason, no game studio feels like they can charge a proper $10-$50 price for a high-quality AAA title. And now, apparently charging $1 for an app upgrade is a big no-no as well (prior to this appstore business, that's how all software was sold. You buy version 2 and you then you pay for version 3). And that sucks.
Please don't down vote this guy for being "wrong". His view point is seemingly widely held and very appropriate for this conversation, even if it is not completely correct.
Then I'll add another point of view, hoping that I'm not the only one: The issue for me was not that I expected a free update for iOS 7 or a universal app, but that pulling the old app AND replacing it by a paid app with the same name was very misleading. Please name it "Clear 2", "Clear HD" or "Clear+", so that customers have a chance to understand what happened. Not everyone reads blogs.
After updating to iOS 7 (and before learning of the drama surrounding Clear), I wanted to download Clear to my phone again and almost bought it by accident: after all, the icon, app name and app platform (iPhone) were the same, so I figured that the price still being displayed was an App Store bug.
It's not that I care about paying 'a cup of coffee' for an app _at all_, but this felt like a scam. OmniGroup handled this a little better with OmniFocus: They've also pulled the old version, but the new one looks different and is called OmniFocus 2.
I am the engineer behind both Clear for iPhone and Clear+. Your statement could not be further from the truth - it has taken a lot of effort to make the iPad component.
I'll give you a taste of some of the work that needed doing (completely describing everything would take ages). Here's a few examples:
- With iOS7, we switched to using TextKit so that we can vary the text sizes (both internally and via Dynamic Text). This involved a significant refactoring as in the previous codebase, we had to hardcode offsets. Why was it all hardcoded? Anyone who's had to deal with the problem of editable inline text would know that there were no APIs to match the drawing of text and editing via UITextView (which was previously based on UIWebKit; while you could the drawing either via the convenience NSString methods or via CoreText; if you used CT, you'd end up with mismatched visuals when editing / displaying). Did you also notice that when completing items on iOS6, the strikethroughs extended beyond the text on items with more than 1 line? Not anymore, due to the new internals.
- The architecture on the iPad is completely different vs the iPhone - on the iPhone, you have a single "list view" (custom implementation to be able to provide all the advanced gestures). On the iPad, you now have two view controllers that need to stay in sync, animate in sync, etc. It also meant that I had to do significant refactoring to abstract away all the controller logic as it had to be embedded in different controller hierarchies - you really don't want to duplicate all that logic.
- List peeking on the iPad. This required adding support to both the list view and to the item views, again - something many people might not even use but it's extremely handy when you need it.
- Drag and drop on the iPad. iOS does not provide a standard API to drag between views, so I had to implement my own which is fully animated and interactive. Try to dragging tasks to lists on the iPad - the feedback is immediate and you will see the 3D animations when items drop. These are all little details but they take a lot of effort to get right.
- If you run the iPad app, you will see that it has a completely interactive tutorial. We spend significant amount of time on that, to make it feel super nice and provide the best way to acquaint users with the interface. Again, anyone who cares about details will tell you that the final 10% take a considerable amount of the total time.
- You're also not seeing a significant amount of research and testing. We had experimental interactions that never made it to production. We've made many prototypes throughout the life of the app, none of them publicly available. We learn a lot from these but that's all invisible to our users.
The above points just scratch the surface on the work that was needed to bring Clear to the iPad. I hope it illustrates the point that it's not a simple job of just recompiling.
The majority of those changes aren't visible to users. As a corporate developer, I can tell you that it's extremely hard to get funding to make even the most necessary technical changes to an existing piece of software. Normally, the best you can do is sneak it in with a big redesign that has features worth paying for.
The issue is that users have come to expect free updates for the life of the product. I've had five-star apps get 1 star reviews because 'it hadn't been updated in months' – in one case, with an app that already saw nearly three years of continually free updates that each brought a ton of (painstakingly) added technological complexity. Most of our users love the product. We've gotten an award, and have been featured by Apple.
Those 1 star reviews, as you know, are very detrimental. I've had one or two in the past because they _thought_ we were going to charge for an update that we announced.
Anyway, point being that while I feel your pain -- this stuff is never easy to build -- many users do not.
