[xoa]

>It doesn't make sense whatsoever to receive one time payment and provide updates forever.

Duh? This is written in English but I genuinely have trouble making sense of your words. We had this for decades without subscriptions, they're called UPGRADES! You buy 1.x, or 2.x or whatever, and then when 3.x comes out new customers pay full price but existing ones get it at a much reduced price. But they can do so on their schedule, or if they don't then they don't lose anything they already have, they merely don't gain the new features. Which in turn is one of the few truly hard direct bits of incentivizing feedback, developers don't get money "by default", but must earn it each time.

I struggle to understand how suddenly it's like the entire idea of upgrades seems to have vanished. Why would a one time payment mean updates forever for free? But why would it mean subscriptions either?

Edit: Maybe if there is anyone truly to blame as the root of this evil it's Apple for being massively hostile to updates in the App Store for reasons that I will never understand either. That really sucks and probably forced subscriptions on the general population more than any other single actor. For that reason alone I really hope to see alternative stores forced on them by law.

[reaperducer]

We had this for decades without subscriptions, they're called UPGRADES!

Exactly. I bought Panic's Nova for $99. Love it. It came with one year of updates. My year is over. But I don't need any of the new features with the new versions.

When some features are added that I need or want, I'll pay for the new version. No big deal. It may be a year from now, it may be two years from now. It works for my wallet, and it incentivizes the developers to add solid new features.

The whole idea of being drip-fed features by software developers is crazy. I'm not a junkie on the corner holding out a shaky $5 bill to my software dealer to get this month's "fix."

[comfypotato]

With phone upgrades, for example, and an iOS app.

The cost of maintaining different versions of apps for different tiers of payees seems prohibitive. Especially when libraries change constantly.

Maybe I’m wrong and your system would work fine. It doesn’t seem right to me though.

Personally, I think subscriptions are the way forward, just lower cost subscriptions. Why is 15 a month such a standard? Most of the 15/month apps I shell out for feel more like 3/month or 4/month apps.

[funcDropShadow]

> The cost of maintaining different versions of apps for different tiers of payees seems prohibitive. Especially when libraries change constantly.

Perhaps, developers should look for libraries that don't change constantly. That way the could reduce their workload independent from the pricing model.

[MichaelNolan]

> UPGRADES! You buy 1.x, or 2.x or whatever, and then when 3.x comes out new customers pay full price

Upgrades like that kind of suck for everyone though. The users, the developers, the businesses.

Users expect software to get bug and security fixes. By having 1.x, 2.x and 3.x versions, developers have to maintain 3 different versions.

It also forces developers to add new features even if no one wants them. Plenty of good apps are essentially feature complete, but in an upgrade centric world there has to be constant new features. This often makes apps worse.

Subscriptions are a good way to balance the needs of users, developers and businesses.

[logn]

Upgrades can be fun for end-users, like anticipating a new music album. And after feature complete there are features that can be added without muddying a product, e.g., adding plugin support, skins, additional language support, new platforms, performance improvements. And at a certain point in time it's reasonable to no longer make bug fixes in legacy versions.

[shrx]

> Plenty of good apps are essentially feature complete, but in an upgrade centric world there has to be constant new features.

No, there don't have to be, this "upgrade centric world" is a poor straw man.

[BeFlatXIII]

Why not EoL 1.x once 2.2 has been released and likewise EoL 2.x with the release of 3.2.2?

[mrtksn]

It's not my English or that I haven't heard of upgrades, App Stores don't offer a mechanism to sell upgrades. That's why Im proposing it as a solution.

[brookst]

Yes, and that’s because developers won’t be able to support multiple versions, and they don’t want people stuck on old versions that don’t support new phones and library security updates.

In “solving” the subscription problem, upgrades create more cost, bugs, and exposure for everyone.

[mrtksn]

It's actually more than that. Many apps have a server component and this requires ongoing revenue and support for multiple versions of the app even if the new OS of the device doesn't break that app.

[louison11]

Updates have disappeared because most software today is no longer full offline (as was the case of those CD-ROMs you’d use to install softwares back in the days), but a hybrid of offline and online, with a local client making calls to an API. A software company can’t ship a hybrid product and stop running the API, the API has to be kept up, which is often no small feat, and costs money. On top of that, if they had to deploy different endpoints for different versions of the client, the backend management would become absolutely chaotic and cost the company even more.

Tldr: online softwares cost money to run, even after they’re sold. They’re not standalone softwares.

[rebeccaskinner]

I actually look at this from the other direction: the need to somehow justify a monthly subscription fee has encouraged developers to add further user hostile features, including a move toward owning customers data and forcing customers to share data (often with egregious privacy invasive policies) and makes it harder for customers to interoperable with other software.

[s1mplicissimus]

my favorite negative example for this move:

YNAB (You need a budget) - https://www.youneedabudget.com/pricing/

they had a perfectly fine working offline app that i gladly upgraded for the full price every time it was available. now it's subcription/online only and i haven't left a dime there since. bye ynab i'm gonna miss you!

[brewdad]

Which is ironic since the whole point of the app is to teach users to plan cash flows and find areas of excessive spending they didn’t recognize before when it came in periodically. I stopped using it once they pivoted but really, once you learn the basics, a spreadsheet or any other tracking method works just as well.