| This is a pretty important summarization of Apple's biggest issues in my opinion (even if you were a little too strong with the word 'failed'). - Ads are intrusive. No one likes ads and they don't pay very well anyway (Google for instance has had their ad money per ad go down year over year). I feel like their days may be numbered. - Paid apps don't give a user a chance to try an application and if the price is too high, even if the app is truly worth it, it may never get a shot with the user's. Granted Apple still makes a ton of money with these but the app developers have spoken: they make more money with the freemium model. - Free apps with in app purchases make the most money for developers. Unfortunately the whole thing is kind of an ethics conundrum; is it okay to give someone something but they can't use parts of it until they pay you for it? What about schemes that are actually hinder the product just to try and make the user give the app more cash (e.g. buying "energy" or whatever games will use to make things go slow). This model seems to be getting a lot of backlash lately. - The other important one you missed is subscriptions; they are probably more fair but who wants to pay something every month when they probably already have 20 other bills to pay each month? Especially when you look at services who tie little things to paying for a subscription like adding the ability to use subtasks in an application requires a subscription. It's hard to figure out how to sort all of this mess out. Personally I like the option of being able to try an application and if I like it pay for it outright. No ads or in app purchases or subscriptions. Granted subscriptions are sometimes necessary too especially if you're consuming external resources on a constant basis (e.g. "cloud backup" or sync, etc). I'd love to entertain alternatives even if they sound worse at first just to go through the exercise of exploring them and trying to find better ways to make this all work. |
This goes directly against your criticism of IAP, though. The trial is usually implemented by having a "lite" version downloaded, with an IAP to unlock the real version.