[forrestthewoods]

> You were a pay-once app. Released in 2011, pay once each for Android, iOS, and Web and keep for life.

You know. I approve the pushback on enshitification. But there’s something weird about righteous fury over an app which literally costs money to run didn’t provide free updates for literally decades on what probably cost like $5.

I dunno. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way.

[danpalmer]

It's reasonable to feel that reneging on the deal is wrong, while also recognising that $5 for 14 years (and counting) of value is far too low a price. There's no good answer here.

The company is stuck in a bad place where the most loyal users, probably those getting the most value out of it in the long run, aren't paying for it. Subscriptions for newer users are one way, or trying to upsell existing users, but this subscription is exceptionally expensive for what it is, and they can only monetise the non-standard feature set.

I'd like to see a return to versioned software. Call Pocket Casts done, fork it, release Pocket Casts 2 for $20 with all these features. Next year release Pocket Casts 3 for another $20. People can update or not, up to them.

[kalleboo]

The App Store does not have any kind of native support for selling app upgrades which leads to all kinds of problems:

* Links on the web to your app die since the links go to the old version, people who see your app recommended click the link and think the app is gone.

* You can't keep supporting users of older versions with simple bug fix releases without leaving the app live on the store, which confuses users into buying the old version of the app.

* You can't sell upgrades at a discount price (which is common in any other software market)

* Just user confusion in general. They go to reinstall the app, search the App Store "didn't I already buy this? I says I haven't!" The App Store also doesn't give developers any access to customer info so you can only guide these users to the right place in the App Store to find the old version and hope they figure it out.

[danpalmer]

You can make an app no longer available for sale without removing the ability to download it for existing customers. That's all that is really needed. You can also create bundles that discount for new purchasers if they own the old one. I've seen this done by a few people.

It's not something that is well supported, but it's not infeasible.

> Links on the web to your app die since the links go to the old version, people who see your app recommended click the link and think the app is gone.

Links to the store listing page, yes, but also I wouldn't trust those links to work permanently anyway, I'd create a redirect page in my control.

Deep link connections into apps are evaluated at install time, so if a user installs a new version and the site allows this, that should transition correctly.

> You can't keep supporting users of older versions with simple bug fix releases without leaving the app live on the store, which confuses users into buying the old version of the app.

I would suggest stopping updates. If you're disciplined about software releases you can burn down the list of bugs to the point that it's negligible towards the end of the major version, and then close it as no longer updated. Bugs on new OSes are out of scope, a good reason for users to update.

> You can't sell upgrades at a discount price (which is common in any other software market)

I'm pretty sure I've seen this done via an admittedly awkward use of bundles. Alternatively a soft launch to existing users with temporary discount seems very common.

> Just user confusion in general.

This feels solvable, and it's not like the current situation doesn't result in confusion. We have plenty of confusion, so it's just about figuring out the better option. This will vary by userbase.

[foxglacier]

Selling one version is fine if you're clear about that up front. But selling "Pocket Casts" then later selling "Pocket Casts 2" as a separate product is a little bit sneaky if you gave the impression it would include updates. I remember some company that did a similar trick selling licenses with free updates forever. Then one-day they renamed updates to upgrades, which weren't free anymore and pissed off their existing customers.

[nimih]

As someone who paid the $5-10 in 2014 for the same app, I think I would've just preferred it no longer updating, to be honest. When NPR bought the app, they spent the next year adding a number of features I never used (a few of which made the app function worse for my particular usage pattern, and many of which I imagine substantially increased their server costs), and pushed a number of UI redesigns that were less to my personal taste.

I don't personally have the "righteous fury" of the article's author (I'm more just annoyed and disappointed that a nice thing I liked is now noticeably less nice, for complex social and economic reasons outside any one person's control), but I can certainly understand why a person would be mad enough to fork a repo and write a couple hundred words in a blog post.

[rbits]

I don't think they're complaining about a lack of updates

[forrestthewoods]

There’s no universe in which people like this don’t complain.

Release Pocket Caste 2 and they’ll complain. Sub and they’ll complain. Don’t update and they’ll complain.

HN is highly sympathetic to the plight of the open source dev who rage quits because people demand too much for free. This is basically the same thing.

I know this will get downvotes. But I’m not wrong.

[dns_snek]

There are very obvious, important differences between the options they had available. Both in terms of general user expectations for end of life apps, as well as concrete promises made to their customers to make a sale.

Do you apply the same sort of lazy false equivalence to all moral and ethical questions? People will always complain, therefore you can do anything!

I don't think I've ever complained about an app going out of business and discontinuing updates, but I don't have any patience when they take active steps to renege on their promises by adding ads or taking features away - that's just fraud.

[forrestthewoods]

I call bullshit on the claims of “promise”.

When you buy a $3 app on iOS this is not a contractual or moral obligation or promise to provide decades of updates for free.

Just because someone says a promise was broken doesn’t make it true.

[dns_snek]

> When you buy a $3 app on iOS this is not a contractual or moral obligation or promise to provide decades of updates for free.

Who asked for free updates? I repeat:

> I don't think I've ever complained about an app going out of business and discontinuing updates

[forrestthewoods]

Rather than the opening paragraph crying about “broken promises” (which weren’t actually ever promised) perhaps the article should complain that Apple won’t let you download old versions of apps you paid for.

Of course Apple forces devs to update their apps every couple of years to support new minimum SDK requirements.

[kbelder]

>I know this will get downvotes. But I’m not wrong.

Well, that statement was half wrong.

[forrestthewoods]

Rude: yes

Value Added: no

[kbelder]

It was rude, and I probably shouldn't have posted it on HN. It was intended to point out something though, and that was to call out the parent post.

In my opinion, at least, stating something and then adding "I am right!" is rude and disrespectful. It's implying that anybody that disagrees with you is not just wrong, but wrong to the degree that you cannot even allow for the possibility that you are mistaken, or that conversation is pointless. That's why I was rude back.

[bigfishrunning]

If they just didn't update it, that would have been fantastic. It's the updates that added ads which are the problem.

[zmmmmm]

It would actually be fine to me if they left the old app to rot and spun up a new one as a subscription model. Eventually the old one would break and we'd shrug our shoulders and move on.

However instead they took the existing app and vandalised it, abusing the user's privacy and invading their eyeballs.