What’s worse than paid app updates?

Written by

Dan Edwards, writing for Medium:

Recently Tweetbot 4 was released as a cross-platform update that’ll work on iPad & iPhone. Right now (at 50% off), it’s a $4.99/£3.99 app. Regardless of whether you bought the old Tweetbot recently, or at all.

Some people were pretty angry about this

I can understand people not wanting to pay for a piece of software when there are free alternatives. I can understand people not wanting to pay for an update if they feel the value of the update is just not worth the cost.

What I cannot understand is someone getting upset about a developer charging for an update.

Developers have mouths to feed, bills to pay. If someone builds a wonderful piece of software (Tweetbot definitely fits in this category), perhaps it helps to think of it as you supporting that developer. Paying for their app or update is you helping that developer keep the doors open.



  • JimCracky

    Steve Jobs’ obsession with cheap apps (especially in mobile) has skewed people’s perceptions of what an app is worth. Add in the fact that the App Store doesn’t have a means for charging for “upgrades”, and you have the state of affairs we are witnessing today.

    Good software is worth more than $5.

    • JohnDoey

      That is completely absurd. App Store has an in-app purchase API.

      STEVE JOBS TURNED NATIVE APPS INTO STORES.

      If you are the developer of an App Store app, it is like having a store in a mall. You can offer any products you like to all of your users. You can create a new feature and charge everyone $1 for it, or charge everyone $10 for it. They are right there in your app, you can pop up a box and offer them that new feature and they can buy with 1-tap.

      How stupid would you have to be to shutter that store and open up an entirely new store on the other side of the mall and they do a PR campaign to try to regain all of your old customers? And your sales pitch is to buy the same product they bought before, but in a new version. PERHAPS THE MOST BORING AND UNINTERESTING SALES PITCH EVER MADE.

      You can also sell content through your app. For example, if your app enables the users to work with photos or graphics, you can sell cliparts or templates or filters. You can sell a server-side account where the user can publish and share their photos.

      Angry Birds sells the Eagle character for 99 cents in-app purchase and they made millions of dollars just from that.

      If you look at your app as a store, then you maintain what you have already built and what people have already purchased (you bugfix existing features and modernize existing interfaces) and then you roll out more products.

      Tweetbot is a Twitter app, obviously. The entire app itself is like an in-app purchase you might make at twitter.com. If the basic Twitter features in the browser are not enough for you, you pay a few dollars for an app. That is a perfect market to sell additional $1 and $2 add-on features to, right within the app that they already have.

      I have no sympathy for software developers who can’t adjust to a new digital paradigm when they so joyously destroyed the music industry as we knew it and diverted almost all of the revenues from artists to coders.

      And blaming Steve Jobs is literally 180 degrees wrong. When App Store debuted, the common thinking was that the HTML5 World Wide Web was going to replace all software. All the native software was going to go away, because the HTML5 Web had 1-click installs from over the network and native apps didn’t, and the Web had commerce and native apps didn’t. So the developer who is complaining today about low App Store prices is forgetting that the alternative to App Store was not “how things used to be” — the alternative was the Web, with no native software. If you are a C coder, you should be thankful there are people still buying C apps at all in 2015. That was not at all how it was expected to be in 2006.

  • matthewmaurice

    There are updates and there are Updates. Full version and major revs should have a price tag attached, unless you’re on a subscription license. Bug fixes and support releases not so much. Bottom line: much like the 16GB iPhone debate—don’t want it, don’t buy it!

  • gfurry

    I think it is funny how people think $5 is too expensive for a mobile app they may use everyday of their life but don’t flinch at dropping $5 on a latte that will be gone in an hour. I remember being glad to buy $25 mobile apps for my Palm device. I was happy that they weren’t as expensive as desktop apps. I do wish Apple would implement an upgrade system so developers can still make money and users are rewarded for supporting them in the past. How hard would an upgrade code really be? A unique code you could use to upgrade to the latest version? Come on Apple!

    • Moeskido

      Seriously. Anyone who complains about the cost — at this level — of something they use every hour has a chronic affliction that should be treated.

  • dtj

    Companies need to understand that they are better off with good customers than more customers. If the customer pisses and moans about a periodic $5 update to an important part of their daily life and well-being, then they probably don’t need them. It’s like having a high maintainence, insecure {boy,girl}friend. Fire the customer and move on.

  • Obsidian71

    This is analogous to “fake” followers on Social Media. It may feel great to ship a lot of software but a million time $0 is still zero. I hope to see that developers that are at the top of their craft continue to raise their prices up and deliver worthy product and let the bottomfeeders leverage the free stuff they so crave.

  • Kip Beatty

    I don’t get all the hand wringing and attention the media pays to the few who bitch about paying for apps or app upgrades. I’ve owned every version and immediately plunked down my $4.99 to have a version that worked and looked proper on the iPad. So did many others apparently as it was the #1 paid app on the App store for its first few days.

    Where are the “4th version of twitter client lands at #1 on app store even though it costs $4.99 and there is an official client available for free” articles?

    • GS

      Me too, I have no problem paying for major updates, nor do I flinch at paying a sustainable price for a good and useful app. Negativity and sensationalism is the norm for much of the media.. or gossip. Nothing preventing developers from selling their apps at a sustainable price. You want Android and Android customers, or you want Apple and Apple customers? Quality sells. race to the bottom for market share and you go broke fast.

    • JohnDoey

      I don’t have any problem paying for new functionality. The problem is I don’t want to do the I-T work that is required when you shutter an app and replace it with a new app. I don’t want to deal with any of it, including wondering whether I am going to lose data if I delete the old app, or dealing with the folder changing in iCloud Drive. I don’t want to even know about any of it. I have way too many apps and I have an actual job that is not I-T guy.

      App Store can replace a 1.0 with a 2.0 automatically, with no work from me. Every App Store app can have in-app purchases in it, through which the developer can offer me hundreds of new features if they want, and I will open my wallet for a bunch of them. The developer should adjust to the Internet way of doing things (you have one app and you can both ship new features at any time or charge me money at any time) rather than cling to the boxed software way of doing things (you ship once a year and charge users once a year.) The developer can do x amount of work to modernize, and then they can stop asking their users to do 10000x that amount of work as they all stop what they are doing and do some I-T work just so they can keep the ritual of boxed software alive.

      And if you are a developer and you want $X per year and that is that, then there are subscriptions. It could not be easier.

      So there are like 1000 different ways to make money in App Store, and developers are complaining that they want it to go back to when there was 1 way to make money in software. That is clearly nostalgia. You should not be surprised when people who don’t share that nostalgia are not happy to go along with you. It’s like when a band releases a vinyl LP of their new album, that is for nostalgia purposes. People who share that nostalgia will be right there with you, but the other 99% will be really unhappy. All of the stuff from the boxed software era is not only gone, but only a tiny fraction of today’s software users even lived through that era. They don’t know WTF an “upgrade” is. Is that when you login to Facebook and it looks a little different than last time? Is that when you get a new iOS?

      Consider the amount of complaining about the I-T work that goes with upgrading an iPhone from iOS 8 to iOS 9. And that is literally 1% of the I-T work you would have had to do to upgrade Mac OS 8 to Mac OS 9. But people are not up for it today. The idea that we are also going to have to manually intervene in every one of our app’s lives once a year or so to delete it, pay for it again, reinstall it — ha ha ha. There are about 1 billion iOS users and they each have something like 15 3rd party apps. You’re talking about taking up thousands and thousands of human lifetimes if they have to deal with those apps like boxed software. The fact that they don’t have to deal with those apps that way is one of the key reasons why they have 15 apps instead of 3 or zero. To come along now and artificially impose I-T work on almost a billion iOS users who don’t want to to any I-T work is literally insane. It’s like the idea of building a wall around the United States to satiate the nostalgia of White Supremacists. Not only is it a bad idea — it literally can’t be done. It’s 100% nostalgic fantasy.

  • mmmm, latte.

  • Didn’t think twice. Bought it on the spot.

  • JohnDoey

    I think you are totally wrong. These kinds of updates are as obsolete as the physical media that they were invented for. Today, the developer can ship the same app with new features as in-app purchases now. All of the people who the developer is trying to convince to stop what they are doing, delete and app that they have been using, buy and install a whole new app, and then if they are lucky and there aren’t any new bugs, after all of that, they have to retrain themselves on the new app because likely a bunch of stuff has been moved around to make it appear new, and then eventually, finally, they may get back to a place where they are likely getting THE EXACT SAME FUNCTIONALITY as they had before. THAT IS WAY TOO MUCH I-T WORK for the regular humans who are the customers of App Store. You literally might as well ask the user to type Terminal commands to get your app.

    A developer who ships a whole replacement app that obsoletes the previous app is like movie studios that constantly reboot the superhero movie again and again, retelling the same old boring origin story that nobody is interested in. Nobody is interested in that. It is a cop-out. It is pure laziness on the part of the developer.

    For an example of how developers should be doing upgrades, look at Tumult Hype for Mac, which is made by ex-Apple developers who understand how App Store actually works and aren’t trying to impose a 20th century CD/DVD market on App Store. Tumult replaced Hype 2.5 with a free Hype 3.0 upgrade that had a cleaned-up interface, bug fixes, but basically the same feature set as Hype 2.5. And there is a menu item in Hype 3.0 that enables you to pay $49 to turn on the totally-new-in-3.0 features if you want those features.

    I bought the in-app purchase for Hype 3.0, and I was super-happy with it, but I would have been really unhappy if they had shipped Hype 3.0 for $49 in App Store. Same money, but an entirely different experience.