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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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.