[alok-g]

Only thing I can add (indirectly covered in your comment) is that software companies are competing with each other too. So once quality vs. price bar gets set, it is hard for another company to offer a better quality while asking for a higher price. This is one of the reasons how a lot of software has gotten to ad-funded.

Dan Ariely (author of the book Predictably Irrational) called allowing free apps on AppStores to be a mistake made by the industry. The customers have now gotten used to free apps, making it harder for the industry/developers to offer better quality.

[pjc50]

Theoretically software products could compete on "quality", but this is quite rare because it's hard for the customers to measure. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

I don't agree with the idea that free apps are inherently bad - that would rule out Open Source / Free Software, and it would also put the boundary vs "free" web pages in a strange place.

"Free"+adsupported and "Free"+IAPs have certainly produced some strange and terrible incentives though. As has the incredibly bad discovery process on app stores.

[alok-g]

We are mostly in agreement. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15532543

I do find open-source software to be generally lower in quality than paid products. Though there are many exceptions at this point in time where open-source is rather highly superior.

However, even in cases where someone could produce a better paid software for an open-source alternative, they practically cannot as it is hard to compete with free.

[tinus_hn]

In my opinion open source software typically has worse design but better implementation.

For instance, in the latest iOS there is a stupid bug where the calculator blocks the buttons if you press them too fast. So if you enter 1+2+3 the display will show 23.

In open source this would be trivial to fix. In closed source you have to wait for Apple to do its implementation, testing, distribution.

In open source you would have a customizable calculator with a million generally useless buttons though because it’s so easy to add them.

[fjsolwmv]

Ariely was talking about free crapware, not community ware. But even opensource only works in the community. Once you go to apptore you get tons of derivatives of open source stuff, laden with crap layers

[njarboe]

I think it is even worse than that. I would like to pay for all of my apps. I could not find any way on Android to filter out all of the free apps and just show ones that have a price.

[fjsolwmv]

You obviously don't want to pay for the same app+crap currently offered for free, but the purveyer would happily offer it for a fee. What you say you want isn't actually what you want. What you want is a quality filter. And that is what Apple claims to provide, and Google intentionally does not.

[twobyfour]

I would suggest that the problem is that the app stores don't properly support the free trial model.

I won't spend $10 on an app sight unseen because if it's crap or even just plain doesn't do what I need, there's no way to know that aside from trying to parse it out of the reviews that the developer probably bought from a spammer.

I will spend $10 in a heartbeat on an app that I've tried for two weeks and don't want to go back to living or working without.

But AFAICT, Apple explicitly forbids that business model in its store. Dunno whether or why Google Play apps don't use it more, tho.

[detaro]

Google Play also doesn't really have a good way of implementing that as far as I know. You can do free app and unlock via IAP, but no matter how clearly you spell it out on the page people will not read it and kill your ratings with "1-star, SCAM!" reviews.

Something like this really should be a store-level feature

[alok-g]

Indeed. I am often happy to pay the developer for a better software, but no such thing may even be available.