[bluetidepro]

>Even if the app is only around and viable for a year, if you use it every day, is it really so hard to justify spending $20 on it?

That's exactly what I'm worried about. It COULD be a year (and in that case, yes, it would be worth it), but no one can guarantee that. It could be tomorrow for all we know. And that is why I say it's a gamble I don't really want to take on a social networking app (no matter how nice the UI/UX is).

It's worth more to me to just use the browser Twitter app (has a few flaws but isn't THAT bad) for free then take a huge risk with $20.

[msbarnett]

> That's exactly what I'm worried about. It COULD be a year (and in that case, yes, it would be worth it), but no one can guarantee that. It could be tomorrow for all we know.

If they stopped supporting it tomorrow, it wouldn't disappear from your device. The earliest it would possibly break would be in the next major OS upgrade.

Y'know, in about a year.

The idea that a measly $20 is too much to pay for months of engineering and design work up to now, let alone going forward, is utterly absurd.

I'd expect it from Joe Random Entitled-Guy, but I'd expect a higher standard from HN, where presumably the sentiment is that devs ought to be able to subsist above the poverty line.

[bluetidepro]

> If they stopped supporting it tomorrow, it wouldn't disappear from your device. The earliest it would possibly break would be in the next major OS upgrade.

That's not true at all. Twitter could revoke their API access or something that could break it tomorrow. Yes the actual app may still be on my device but nothing says it will actually still be able to work. That is all in Twitter's hands.

> The idea that a measly $20 is too much to pay for months of engineering and design work up to now, let alone going forward, is utterly absurd.

That is their decision to make this bet. If I were to spend years and years making the perfect toaster and I charge $1,000 for it (to pay for the engineering and design work), you're saying it's absurd NOT to buy it? It's actually the opposite. It's absurd to assume that just because someone puts engineering and design into a product, that it automatically makes the product worth X price.

[msbarnett]

> If I were to spend years and years making the perfect toaster and I charge $1,000 for it (to pay for the engineering and design work), you're saying it's absurd NOT to buy it?

It's never absurd to choose not to buy anything. But your analogy gets in the way of what is absurd. We're not talking about charging $1000 dollars (the same price as a nice laptop, a middling DSLR, or a crappy used car) for a toaster.

We're talking about $20 (the same price as a delivered pizza, a middling steak, and less than two tickets for an hour and a half movie) for a polished piece of software.

What's absurd is asserting that that's too much to ask for the product of months of engineering and design work. You certainly don't have to buy it! It's totally ok if it's not worth $20 of your money, to you.

But asserting that the authors ought to value their work less than a pizza, that they're doing something wrong by asking a not-unreasonable pizza-money price for it, is entitled, race-to-the-bottom mentality crap.

Engineers are expensive, iOS engineers doubly so. This meme that their work is worth less than a candy bar, let alone a pizza, is a toxic devaluation of the worth of every engineer working in the software field

coda: They're currently both the #2 paid app and #2 top-grossing app in the App Store, so the demand is certainly there at $20. Devaluing their work by launching at less would have accomplished nothing but leaving money on the table.

[ruswick]

Value is determined not by the amount of work put into it, but by the precedent set by the market. So long as there are free and sub-$3 clients, $20 is anomalous.

What gets me most about arguments like these is that you are pulling numbers out of thin air. You assert that $.99 is too little for an app, but provide no context nor any evidence to support that. Give me a number that demonstrates the monetary value to the consumer of an hour of development. You can't.

Insofar as there is no absolute value of development time— and, therefore, of apps— the only way to gauge value is based on market precedent. If everyone else is charging $2 for their apps, yeah, $20 is too much.

[msbarnett]

> Value is determined not by the amount of work put into it, but by the precedent set by the market.

directly contradicts:

> If everyone else is charging $2 for their apps, yeah, $20 is too much.

Let this sink in: Tweetbot for has been out for less than 24 hours. It is already #2 in sales and #2 in Mac App Store revenue.

The market completely disagrees with your latter statement.

What you're seeing here isn't that $20 is too much given that everyone else is selling at $2.

Rather, what you're seeing is that everyone else, operating under the received "wisdom" that apps are worth less than a cup of coffee, are leaving absolutely staggering amounts of money on the table by being afraid to ignore the nonsense and ask for real value in return for their work.

[cynix]

> Let this sink in: Tweetbot for has been out for less than 24 hours. It is already #2 in sales and #2 in Mac App Store revenue.

To be fair, Tweetbot only has to sell 1/10 as many copies as those $2 apps in order to beat them at the sales ranking.

[ruswick]

It's been one day. That is too short a period of time to determine anything. Given the rush of people buying it on the first day, a high rating is to be expected. What is your point?

Incidentally, I do think that apps ought to cost less than $4, because that is the precedent that has been set. If Tweetbot would prefer to charge the inordinate sum that they are, that is their choice. But, so long as people are selling great clients for much less or for free, that will be the standard and that will be the point from which I judge value.

[reaganing]

It could break much sooner than that. All Twitter would need to do is cut off access to it, like they just did with [Tweetie](http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/10/11/rip-tweetie-for-mac-w...)

I think we can expect third-party clients to be allowed for a while more, maybe even a year or two, but who knows.

[jug6ernaut]

If $20 is a "huge risk" for you, you probably shouldn't be buying any frivolous software.

[kalms]

But he is making a good point. You're buying something that the seller essentially have no control over. You better be ready to lose that $20.

That said, I still think the app is worth it.