[dirtae]

What's your plan when you release the next major version of OmniGraffle? You will create a whole new App Store listing for it? Or you'll somehow have a single listing for OmniGraffle on the App Store, and people who have purchased v7 but not v8 will be able to unlock v7 but not v8 within the app?

The latter sounds like an unholy mess, the former is very annoying as a developer, since you lose all of your reviews and history, and customers generally don't really understand how to download apps they've purchased which are no longer listed on the App Store, and presumably you'd pull OmniGraffle v7 from the App Store.

Also, right now in the U.S. Mac App Store, you have 3 reviews on the current version of OmniGraffle, and 2 out of 3 are 1 star reviews complaining about the way your free trial is presented.

The Mac App Store is a broken mess.

[kcase]

Yes, we'll create a whole new App Store listing for it, just as OmniGraffle 5, 6, and 7 have each had their own listing.

I agree that it's sad to lose all our previous reviews, especially as our earlier apps had very high average ratings. But the bigger issue is combating confusion, which leads to bad ratings when people miss a feature that the app actually has, or are confused when a "free" app actually costs money. I'm hopeful that being able to reply to confused customers will help to clear some of that up!

[richardwhiuk]

The problem with this approach is that it's impossible to provide discounts to users who had the previous version, which is a long standarding practice (and a valuable one).

[kcase]

I agree that's a valuable, long-standing practice, but that problem has been solved: by offering discounted in-app purchases, we've been offering upgrade discounts to upgrading Mac App Store customers since we shipped OmniGraffle 6 in 2013.

If you read my latest blog post on the subject (linked in my first comment in this thread), you can see full details on how we're offering upgrade discounts to all existing customers, free upgrades for recent purchases, and free trials so new customers can check out the app before they pay—all in the App Store.