The way that people value software these days is completely insane.
People writing you hate mail are bad clients that you don't want and you can feel free to ignore them.
Also watch this video that was doing the rounds on HN a couple of years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U&t=54s
Your app looks neat - I'll go try it out.
It has been like that since the 2000. It gained wider traction when app stores (looking at you, Apple!) started with a baseline of 0.99 USD in 2009. That's just outright insane. I'd be better off giving away my app for free, because people are lot less demanding when they didn't pay for something.
It looks to me like they are attempting to attract funding.
But based on my experience, I would say someone worked their ass off to make that UI (because Docker is damn hard for newcomers) and the automatic updates (because zero-day exploits can happen and almost nobody checks for updates manually, and then you have tons of users at risk and incredibly bad PR) and simply didn’t consider adding the possibility of skipping or hiding those functionalities.
You just can’t do everything users want, but you do try hard to please almost everyone.
And if that person that did that work reads this comment, they will feel horrible when even after all this work, they still get mostly bad criticism and no thanks. Comments like these can break a person.
We got used to critiquing companies and products because we keep forgetting that behind them are just people working hard, and maybe 2-3 people in charge that make bad decisions along the way dragging everyone down with them.
In that case, seems fair enough that as a business suddenly being asked to pay for Docker Desktop, you'll start asking for a more polished experience.
But they've already done the incredibly hard part which is creating and popularising OCI, developing an engine that works on most operating systems, and having nice tooling around all of that.
Polishing the Docker Desktop experience should be fairly easy as soon as people let the Docker devs know how they expect it to work: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues
https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Ao...
I gave people a fairly complex solution in an easy to use package for free because I had no idea other users would pay for it. Everyone was happy to use it and ask for features and send emails with “can you please do this in this other way that I like”.
So I continued developing it because positive feedback gets you in this loop where you don’t realize how much time you’re spending on things that you don’t even need in this app and are only to please other users.
When I realized I just spent 4 years on developing all these features I don’t use and there’s a real need for this solution in the world, I started asking for money on advanced features to at least recover some of that development time.
I also added a download link to the last free version of the app for people that don’t need the new paid version.
That’s when hate mail started. “Why the heck would you ask me to pay for the same features that were previously free?” and “lol what a stupid app, you turned it into nagware, I will just use a cracked version from now on”
What’s the solution here? Just develop a hard skin and continue doing the same thing until people stop complaining and get used to your product having a monetary value?
[1](https://lunar.fyi)