This is, of course, completely unsustainable. Savage Interactive has only been able to sustain this particular price point because it's presumably closely correlated to new iPad purchases. It's the most high-profile iPad visual art app, perennially promoted on the App Store, and so you can model it more or less as a tiny percentage of quarterly iPad revenue. That is a market position, in its vertical, with space for approximately one.

I don't have a solution for this problem. There has to be something in between a one-time $10 purchase and a $120 annual subscription, but Apple hasn't shown any interest in finding it.

Paid upgrades have worked well for other platforms but Apple stubbornly refuses to support this, instead trying to drive users into subscriptions they don't want.

I think it's too late now. Apple has taught an entire generation of users that mobile software is not worth paying real money for and effectively killed the ecosystem of apps they need to promote the iPad as a general purpose computing device.

Agenda notes app has elegantly solved this. Pay once and permanently unlock all current features. If a new release has a feature you want, you can purchase again.

It's more work for the developer but they did a great write up on how they built this capability: https://medium.com/@drewmccormack/a-cash-cow-is-on-the-agend...

Hmmh, on its own its not enough, I think. Just read through the post, and there is no trial of expensive features in their setup, just a set of free features to begin with. But it seems that Apple allows these days to trial features, as long as your app remains usable and useful without them.

Well, not apple to be fair. Developers are free to set their prices to whatever; it just so happens some developers set their prices to $0.99 and set that as the expectation

It's a race to the bottom. There's always somebody willing to go lower and the app store doesn't give you much room to stand out. Before I quit I had users complaining my app was overpriced at $1.

Unlike Wintel, Apple absorbs the lion’s share of profits in the iOS ecosystem, and seem to want apps to be free complements to their hardware.

Perhaps Apple Arcade for apps?

When you put it like that, yeah, mobile app pricing is messed up.

Compare that to desktop programs like Adobe Creative Cloud, which costs more than $500 a year. Or console games, where the console costs about $300 (Switch Lite) and a single game costs almost $100.

(All priced CAD, rounded.)

It all depends on perspective. From my point of view, Adobe's pricing is definitely messed up and I know a few people who are still using pre-CC versions because they don't want to pay for a subscription, especially if they only use Photoshop occasionaly.

On a similar note, I pay on average 5USD per (PC) game by tracking sales and would only consider paying more than 10USD for new games that I want to play really badly (e.g. DOOM Eternal). Console game pricing always seemed way too high to me, I'd spend what I saved on not building a PC in just a few AAA titles.

For an even more extreme perspective, I haven't paid for software of any sort in over 20 years, and I don't pirate either. I don't play games and if I want to edit a photo I figure out how to do it in gimp.

I've been busy the last two decades too. I've built websites, used CAD to design and machine dozens of physical objects, designed circuit boards, wrote and compiled software, made music, simulated chemical reactions, created and edited text documents, converted files from all sorts of formats to other formats, deployed databases with millions of rows, run two small businesses, and sent and received thousands of communications over myriad channels. All using free and open source software.

If there's something I want to do with a computer and I can't find a free solution that does it I write new code to accomplish my task (but honestly, this almost never happens these days).