[microflash]

A typical playbook of many iOS and macOS apps: crippled free version as a vehicle for subscriptions, with an extremely expensive lifetime offering that takes a decade to break even (very few apps make over a decade, a lot many just change the TOS to pretend lifetime plan did not exist in the first place after a few years of offering them).

On the first blush, there’s a hint of promise. I like that I can add both plain RSS and podcasts (have yet to find an RSS reader that handles podcast feeds seamlessly). Many other players (Reeder [1] and Surf [2]) are attempting to tackle similar usecase.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/reeder/id6475002485

[2]: https://surf.social

[DavideNL]

Well... you can just subscribe for a month, cancel it immediately, and try it for month

The thing that annoys me more is the Apple dependency/tax ; i'd rather pay the Developer directly, in cases where they offer this on their own website (i always check.)

[theshrike79]

For developers the "Apple tax" is easier. They don't need to deal with refunds or customer complaints about payments not working.

[jeffgreco]

For developers the “Apple tax” is a forced tax slurping up a big portion of our income.

[ben_w]

In my day, the IDE/compiler weren't free (~50% the price of a new computer), the OS wasn't free (~10% the price of a computer, for each update), account handling was such a mess for everyone that I bought software with an actual chequebook and when I cashed in my Kagi* account they sent me an actual cheque too, and the only way to do subscriptions was a direct debit that wouldn't work in every country. Also lots of American companies wouldn't sell me software directly, I had to get friends willing to do the transaction for me and give them money for it.

I'm not saying Apple is entirely fair or well priced (although they were back when the App Store was new, the world changed around them) but I am saying you'll save a lot less than you're expecting to when you do all this stuff yourself — and I'm speaking as one who has.

Keeping track of 190 different sales tax rates is, even by itself, not fun. Best to offload what you can — same reason loads of business go to "the cloud", use site builders or wordpress, or contract out to third-party payroll services.

* payment processor, not search engine; same domain, otherwise completely unrelated.

[musicale]

It's clear that app and game developers don't want Apple's App Store to charge the same kind of platform fees that Google Play or the Nintendo eShop charge.