It's actually a bit trickier than I am about to present it, but: is it possible that you did not suspect that an "alarm clock" should need no Internet permissions?

It was described as an “alarm/weather widget” - the weather portion would need network access to get uptodate forcast data so that wouldn't seem odd.

I have to suspect they thought whoever was gullible enough to pay $3-6 a month for an alarm app would surely not care about their data going along with it.

The entire demographic in the data is willing to pay $3-6 a month for an alarm app. I'd sell the data too, they're probably hitting printer ink levels of valuation for it.

I never thought about how valuable the list of idiots willing to sub for basic functionality apps would be.

Some of us think that if app developers who deliver good apps earn money from it, it will incentivize them to continue creating good apps.

But sometimes I feel myself slipping closer and closer to your much more cynical ideas.

In particular I remember donating what for me was a good chunk of money to Caddy right before they started "experimenting with business models" or whatever he called it. Same goes for happily paying WhatsApp, walking around like a living talking billboard for it only to have them sell out to Facebook shortly after.

Just two examples from the top of my mind.

"Greed is good" --Says the monkey with his hand trapped in a jar.

History has taught us that an enforced rule of law is the only way to prevent scammers from being the dominate players (by number, not size) in a market.

Negative. It ceases to be adaptive to be a cheater when cheaters exceed a certain percentage of the population. The advantage comes from information asymmetry.

Law makes cheating less adaptive. But even without law, cheats would not exceed some small minority.

There is an alarm clock on iOS that used to be a 4 USD or something pay once that is now a monthly fee that I still use every day. It records your sleep sounds and wakes you up at a time when you're not in a deep sleep (you set a n minute wakeup window.)

They added ChatGPT and all sorts of other shit to it unfortunately but the core functionality is still good

I think now built in iOS sleep schedule with soft wake-up is nearly competitive with sleep cycle and similar apps.

Never leave money on the table!

You can't even buy your way out of it like people suggest. The fact that you want to do that signals you have money and makes your data even more valuable. Even companies that do not do this currently, assuming they are publicly traded, with eventual succumb. They just need a bad quarter or a few people needing to boost their metrics and they'll add the new revenue source.

I am really glad the era of the infuriating parrot line of "If you're not paying for it, you're the product" is coming to an end.

People try to justify everything they do and this is one the worst of them. Some even seemed to use this as an argument against open source which is usually free.

Along the same lines there is "What is your monetization plan?".

The next one I wish would go away is the "but they have a privacy policy" line of thinking. Like that means anything.

"If you're paying for it, you're still the product" is the era we are in now.

We were always in that era but it hadn't become so obvious yet.

People finally realized we're in the danegeld era.