What is the most useless app that you have seen being given as a subscription?
For me, I tried a ‘minimalist’ launcher app for Android that had a 7 day trial or something and they had a yearly subscription based model for it. I was aghast. I would literally expect the app to blow my mind and do everything one can assume to go that way. In a world, where Nova Launcher (Yes, I know it has been acquired by Branch folks but it still is a sturdy one) or Niagara exist plus many alternatives including minimalist ones on F Droid, the dev must be releasing revolutionary stuff to factor in a subscription service.
Second, is a controversial choice, since it’s free tier is quite good and people like it so much. But, Pocketcasts. I checked it’s yearly price the other day, and boy, in my country, I can subscribe to Google Play Pass, YouTube Premium and Spotify and still have money left before I hit the ceiling what Pocketcasts is asking for paid upgrade.
Also, what are your views on one time purchase vs subscriptions? Personally, I find it much easier to purchase, if it’s good enough even if it was piratable, something if it is a one time purchase rather than repetitive.
A watch face for a smart watch.
This one guy made a really popular Android Wear watch face that mimicked the Pixel lockscreen. It only cost a few bucks, and people loved it. Due to some personal things in his life, he had to sell the app to a new developer to make ends meet. The new developer then started charging something like $7/WEEK subscription for a watchface that he didn’t even develop in the first place, and runs entirely locally on the device so it’s not like he’s maintaining any servers or anything.
Absolutely absurd.
What. If that business model actually works for him, something is wrong with this world.
It does work. People are distracted and are not reading every message correctly. And payment processing in the appstores is also kind of easy - so you might be able to scam a few people into subscribing and they might not notice this directly. You know that you are not checking your credit card bills in details every month. So you can get a nice revenue stream of unsuspecting customers for a few month until you’ve burned down every little bit of trust and user base you had
I too ran into an Android Wear watch face that mimicked the Pixel lockscreen. However, it was priced X INR(Indian Rupee) per year in my country and was decently cheap. However, I soon ran into another app, which was a one time purchase, that did what it did mainly(sync and show phone and watch battery on each other) and worked on most lock screens. So the latter was a proper kind of app design amd atleast not subscription hell.
There’s only two reasons an app should be a subscription.
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The app requires constant server connection that is an active cost to the developer.
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The app requires constant updates for maintaining functionality/ relevancy.
There are a few subscriptions I pay for (Nabu casa for one). There’s real merit in the subscription model, but it should only be about 1% of things not 80%.
You could also argue apps that uses some kind of licensed content the app pays for.
I’m not saying I’m a fan of Netflix and Spotify, but they do use alot of money to keep their content available, and not only for server costs.
They still overcharge tho.
Yeah, paying for content streaming is different than simply paying for an app that runs locally. Spotify proved that people will be willing to pay for music, as long as it is easier than piracy. Netflix’s early days (when it was actually a one stop shop for all of the available content) proved the same with TV/movie streaming. They proved that piracy largely isn’t an issue with cost, but rather convenience and accessibility.
But with a local app, that all goes right out the window. There’s no reason you’d need to pay a subscription for an app that runs everything locally and only gets sporadic updates. There isn’t any licensing to worry about, or third party systems to pay off. The only reason to have the subscription in this instance is pure greed.
Any app that doesn’t require any backend to function.
If you ask for a subscription for an app without the need to support a backend… I won’t subscribe. I’ll find something else.
Mostly anything else is fine.
Though, if it’s something like a Note-Taking app where the cloud infrastructure for backups and sharing would cost pennies and you’re asking more than $1 a month, I’m out. Looking at you, Evernote. $64 a year to replace the built-in Notes app? No thanks.
Ok so I don’t completely agree… The thing is: mobile apps today have this approach where they don’t have “releases”, there’s one entry on the app store, and if you buy that you usually get updates for as long as it exists.
In the past, computer software always had periodic (usually yearly) releases, which meant that if you bought one version, afterwards you’d have maybe updates for bugfixes and such, but no new features. The result was that the development of new features was paid by people replacing the old version with the new one, because they wanted the improved version.
Nowadays you buy the app and you keep getting new features, sometimes for years, and that development is paid solely thanks to new buyers. Which is cool if you are the customer but it’s not great long term for the developer.
That’s true, but it’s also possible to release apps individually on mobile similar to PC releases.
We also currently get the worst of both worlds with stuff like Goodnotes. They had a one-time buy, but currently they’ve injected AI-related nonsense into v6. They allow owners of the previous version to still use v6, but it’s extremely crippled and functionally worse than 4 or 5. Constant nagging about the new version and features. V6 fully replaced v5 on the App Store, so we can’t do anything about it now. Even in my purchase history, my purchase was forcibly “upgraded.”
What I paid for was a digital notebook app that I could write down notes on with my Apple Pencil and iPad. It had a few nice features I didn’t really need, but were nice to have like writing-to-text replacement. It had cloud backups, but they were through iCloud or OneDrive on the user’s individual storage so I’m assuming it didn’t add a monthly cost overhead to the developer.
Now it’s a subscription model app with features I don’t want nor need that completely replaced the app I paid for.
Good notes has an option to revert to v5 and I haven’t had any issues so far staying on v5.
I thought they also had a one time purchase option for v6 but it’s been awhile since I looked.
They did the switch better then notability tried to do. Notability tried to switch otp users to their new plane after a grace period of a year. They caved to backlash and added a legacy plan for older purchasers.
Payroll pretty much always costs more than hosting. Update frequency and quality is a far more useful consideration
All of them. You should be able to buy a program and its yours.
Disagreed. If it requires a server side element, it incurs an ongoing cost and a subscription can be justified. And to clarify, by “requires”, I’m referring to the functionality, not having it shoveled in. And the price should be realistic.
Some apps do this well, Sleep for Android is an example that comes to mind. Free with ads, ad-free is an inexpensive one time purchase. You can also purchase additional plugin apps that add functionality that isn’t required or even useful for most people. And finally, they have a cloud plugin app to let you backup your data, you can pay for their cloud subscription which is $2.99 a year, but you can also just use other cloud for storage like Google drive.
But if the server side element is just cloud storage, you should be able to supply your own server.
Then the dev needs to build out a range of protocols and API’s to enable users to “supply their own server”, which can bring a range of additional headaches, like having to provide support for external dependencies outside their control, etc.
What if the users “server” fails? Should the dev waste hours of their life assisting a user with a highly specific Google Drive issue when they spent $5, 3 years ago?
If it requires a server side element, it incurs an ongoing cost and a subscription can be justified.
But why do that?
JetBrains ran aground of this years ago when they introduced a subscription model for their (excellent) software. People (rightly) lost their fricking minds when they heard that if they cancelled their subscription, they’d lose the ability to continue using the software they’d already paid for.
So JetBrains went back and reworked their system so that a cancelled subscription would continue to have the rights to install all the software that existed up to the day of cancellation. Effectively meaning that if v3 came out the day before you cancelled, you can still install and use v3 10 years later.
JetBrains comes to mind as one of the fairest subscription services I know. It also get cheaper the longer you’re subscribed, incentivizing you to to stay subscribed. It’s both smart and user friendly.
The worst one is probably Adobe.
I do use JetBrains software. If subscriptions all agreed that when you cancel the subscription you can continue to use the latest version before you cancelled, I’d be prepared to consider them. Any software ought to be able to do this except software that uses significant server resources. I’d even consider rent-to-own where you get to keep the software after a certain number of payments. (Splice offers some music software like this.)
Roland have a ton of good software synthesizers but I will never subscribe to them because the moment you stop they take the whole lot away. Even their “lifetime license” requires an active Roland account and the software disappears if you ever close the account or they change their minds. Similarly I haven’t used any Adobe software since they went subscription only.
Yeah that was basically the sentiment of the developer community when JetBrains announced the change. Thankfully they heeded the screaming and fixed their model. I’ve been using JetBrains tools for around 10 years now and they continue to impress. I can’t recommend them enough.
If you want a worse example than Roland, let me tell you about my solitary experience with IK Multimedia. I bought a secondhand hardware synth of theirs off marketplace. Get it home and try to download the software tool to control and update it. It tells me to set up an account, and then lets me download it, awesome. Plug it in and fire up the software, and it tells me I’m not licensed. Wait, what? Search through their support site and it turns out that to transfer the “license” for this piece of hardware you have to pay them $49. Sunk cost fallacy got the better of me at this point and I sent an email through to support asking if I could pay the transfer fee. Nope, only the original owner can transfer the license. I was so immediately turned off it that it sat around as a paperweight for a few months. Ended up selling it to a pawn shop.
Meanwhile, Arturia are the exact opposite. When you buy a digital license of the Arturia V Collection, you own that license. Which includes being able to sell it to someone else, and transfer it to their account for free. I bought a secondhand MIDI controller of theirs, which had some bonus licenses for their software originally included. They transferred the license to me with just a picture of the serial number label. But I could still download and use the software for setting up macros and updating it without doing that.
Someone linked them up thread and it doesn’t quite work like that. You need to have been using a version for 12 months before that becomes your “fallback license”. So, if v3 came out the day before, your fallback license would only be v2 if you cancelled.
Oh! Good to know. I guess that’s there to prevent people from reaping 2 years worth of development for a 1 year fee. That still seems reasonable to me.
Not quite - you get a perpetual license for the version that was released a year before you cancelled your subscription. And for most languages this is not really practical anyway, as they get relatively frequent updates that require IDE updates, so you will just stay subscribed.
This was a fairly low business risk, high PR value move by JetBrains.
Sygic broke trust like that with me . The software is/was excellent and very reasonable, so I bought licences for parts of world and suddenly they made it subscription based app, with ability to keep forever licence for only part of world you bought.
So even though I have fully paid software , i have to pay subscription for the feature of Android Auto and world maps.
It was the list betrayal of trust i have seen. I never used sygic after that at all.
Mobile games for kids are the worst. Those and any self-help mental health apps.
It’s $10 a month to access the features of a basic game that runs on the local device, or the subscription renews weekly, or you can get a 7-day free trial after which it charges you for the entire year. And in the latter case, you usually have to sign up for the free trial before you are allowed to see ANY content.
A cheap subscription makes sense for some things, especially those using cloud based resources. But so much of that business model seems to rely on making money by screwing people that forgot they were paying you.
