We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon

Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by izacus on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @12:05PM (#27119810)

In the great subscription exodus of 2018, about 10-15 of my apps moved to this "sustainable" subscription model. Only two are still being maintained with proper new features and improved (those would be 1Password and Jetbrains tooling).

All the other apps pretty much stopped feature work and are now mostly more broken than they were before switching to the subscription model. There's an occasional update, but it's all pretty much dead.

So out of that deal I (as a user) have gotten pretty much nothing - the developer is constantly taking my money with nothing to offer in return. If I stop paying, they'll take away the app I've paid for.

Compare this to something like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop model - I pay license every year to get support for new OS and new feature. But it's MY choice whether I want to pay and if the updates actually offer me VALUE for the money.

And this keeps us honest - honest money for honest value delivered with incentive for developer to keep maintaining their software and not just sitting on their rent-seeking vendor lockin. It seriously sucks that Apple and Google don't allow for that sales model in their stores - it makes the market worse for all of us.

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Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by joshstrange on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @12:20PM (#27120009)

Could you name and shame some of the apps your are talking about? I pay for 1Password and JetBrains and similarly am happy with them but I also pay for a number of other subscriptions and I haven't felt the same "resting on their laurels" that you are describing.

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Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by izacus on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @12:48PM (#27120364)

Out of top of my mind - Evernote, Lightroom on Desktop. A PDF reader on my Android phone (still doesn't support dark mode, years after introduction). Boostnote, another note-taking app. LastPass also doesn't really justify their costs considering their poor engineering.

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Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by 1123581321 on Saturday May 15, 2021 @11:54PM (#27171073)

Sincerely, what do you mean by including Evernote? You can see here they’re pretty busy. Aren’t they also doing a bunch of behind-the-scenes re-architecture? https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500001700002

I haven’t been a user for years; I’m just a perplexed bystander.

Lightroom has some updates but I’ll agree the pace is slower. They are a market leader for certain kinds of commercial photographers that will happily pay a couple hundred a year for a critical business expense. I wish they’d see more competition.

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Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by wunderbaba on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @10:02PM (#27125841)

Evernote is one of the few that might at least have a legitimate case for having a recurring monthly fee since ostensibly you're paying for cloud storage and synchronization across all of your devices.

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Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by arvinsim on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @01:53PM (#27121229)

I really want to move out of Lightroom CC. However, there are no competitors out there that has cloud sync on my Mac and iOS devices.

Hoping that Affinity can come up with something. Even if it doesn't sync, I would still get it.

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Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by eric_cc on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @01:18PM (#27120729)

Boostnote is still free and open source. They also have a paid version but there is no real reason to switch to it.

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Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by sb057 on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @12:07PM (#27119846)

>So out of that deal I (as a user) have gotten pretty much nothing - the developer is constantly taking my money with nothing to offer in return. If I stop paying, they'll take away the app I've paid for.

That's a feature, not a flaw.

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Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by izacus on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @12:10PM (#27119888)

I fail to see how this is a feature for me as a user in any way.

I get it - developers want to rent-seek and suck on that sweet passive income without actually having to constantly provide any value for users. But from a users perspective, I get nothing, especially when the response from developers is to just stop development.

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Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by 1_player on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @02:03PM (#27121361)

It'd be acceptable if the developer in turn were to refund me all the money I've given them when I was subscribed.

I'm left with nothing, they're left with nothing. That's fair enough.

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Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by drewzero1 on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @12:47PM (#27120353)

A feature for the seller, not for the user. We've moved on from personal computers to computers as a service, but it's getting pretty clear who they're serving.

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Re:We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon by Causality1 on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @12:28PM (#27120120)

Just speaking from personal experience, app updates are generally bad things aside from compatibility fixes. Either they're adding a feature that I'm not going to use because I was happy with the app already, or they break something. Probably 25% of the apps on my phone are now decoupled from the Play Store because the developers either broke them or sold out to an adware company looking for a new vector.

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