Further, Apple released the Mac App Store and dropped the price of iWorks apps to $19.99 (or 9.99?) thereby reducing the perceived value of Mac apps as well. Pre MAS, when Apple included iWork and iLife for free with your Mac you looked at it as Apple throwing in several hundred dollars worth of software for free with the Mac. By changing the structure where you now downloaded those apps, they assigned a value to them that was really low affecting the entire eco system.
Considering the massive growth of the Mac eco system, that the state of Mac software is at best as good as it was 10 years ago with a much smaller market is disappointing.
Back in the day, when you bought MyProgramSuite v2, you got v2. You want v3, you pay for it, creating an incentive to develop a better v3, v4, etc.
Now, imagine if anyone who bought Word 1.0, 2.0 automatically got all future upgrades for free. What happens when the market saturates?
Not to mention the ease of software piracy.
Not entirely fair to Google here.
No one would have purchased the original iPhone were it not heavily subsidized by AT&T. No one. One could argue that the same forces apply today regarding most phone purchasers.
> and god knows what else when if much rather just pay like $49 for a properly made application with a permanent license.
Except the numbers of downloads show that this approach isn't gaining traction. In fact, look at how many applications switched to a subscription model the moment Apple permitted it?
On the side of development, subscriptions make sense. Software development isn't a one-off fee to make software these days, as 99.995% of the people here realize.
Isn't subscription the only sustainable model?
The original iPhone was not subsidized by AT&T at all. It cost about $500, had lines of people waiting to buy it, and went on to sell about 6 million units, making it one of the best selling phones of it's time.
I also don't believe you need to actually create multiple versions, rather maintain some feature flags.