[wilshipley]

The subscription model fails in a lot of ways, for everyone. For example, my next app is an interior design / home control app. How would the customer feel if they stopped paying and didn’t have access to their house any more? Most people would be pissed. I don’t want to hold my customers’ data for ransom and cut them off if they stop paying me my extortion money.

I’m pretty sure we can do micro-subscription already — I could ask Apple to just charge $1 a month, that’s pretty micro. (I don’t think we can do pennies, yet.) But that model doesn’t really work for all types of apps.

For instance, I estimate about half the people who buy version one of my app will enter their floorplan into their computer, place their furniture, be happy, and never use the app again (until I upgrade it to offer home control, as well). If those users had the option to just pay me 5 cents for the month they used the app, I’d have to get 16 million of these users to make back the money I’ve put into this app.

That’s not really feasible.

-—

My point with the web is that pass-through web “apps” on iOS are the same as pass-through web “apps” on Android, so Apple is losing a competitive advantage if they kill of their native developers.

If you’ve got Slack or Chrome or a banking app or a finance app or a health app on your iPhone, you could be running the exact same app on Android. So why did you spend extra on an iPhone? Apple needs to treat its independent, native developers better because we are the only ones who are making products that are Apple-only, and show off all the cool things iOS and macOS can do.

-Wil

[on_and_off]

> for everyone / my next app is an interior design / home control app.

That's a good point but really not "for everyone". Agreed that for a one shot app like this, pay once is the model that works. Although one could argue that you still held the customer data captive as soon as they get a new phone and the app is no longer compatible.

[wilshipley]

Sorry, “for everyone” was intended to mean, “the flaws I’ve identified hurt Apple, some customers, and some developers” not “100% of customers are hurt by the flaws.”

—

I’ve spoken with an Apple SVP about the compatibility issue and it's huge, you’re right. My suggestion to them at the time was to boot apps out of the app store that don’t stay up-to-date.

But there’s a gap I can’t solve, which is Apple doesn’t want users paying more just to keep their apps running on new iPhones.

As a datapoint, though, iOS apps have a LONG shelf-life. I have an iOS app I shipped with iOS 7 and it still runs on iOS 13.

With macOS, yes, we’re all angry because Apple finally made good on its promise to deprecate 32-bit apps after like six years of warning us. And, yah, I lost 60% of my games on Steam and I’m upset about it, but also I like my machine being way more responsive (loading both the entire 32-bit stack and the entire 64-bit stack at once meant a ton of memory pressure and swapping), and I like that Apple doesn’t have to maintain to entirely different codebases and can fix bugs and add features once not twice.

And it’s not like 64-bit apps are a new thing — if you’ve submitted an app to the Mac App Store you’ve been required for YEARS to have it run on 64-bit machines.

It sucks that Steam didn’t enforce this as well — not because they should do Apple’s bidding, but because it would have been a mitzvah to Steam’s customers who just lost a lot of games.

-Wil

[on_and_off]

I think we agree :) More to the point I believe that both models are necessary in a perfect world .. but not sure they will happen.

I too also have way too many mac steam games ... from the very brief period when gaming on a mac was thing. I haven't updated my personal MBP yet but I will have to bite the bullet sooner or later.

Fortunately I have moved on to consoles.. I better not update my mbp and look at my list of compatible games.

There could be another way though, looks like windows 10 still supports 32 bits software via WOW64 (32 bits emulator). In general the one good thing I can say about windows is that it managed to stay retro compatible with pretty much all the previous versions.