I have a bit of fun these days looking up all of the discussions around Twitter and Mastodon clients that are “dead” or “too expensive” and stuff like that.
I am often very hard against all of the subscription models in our society. I do WANT to buy game, movie, TV series … on DVD or BD or downloadable format. Also I prefer software that i can buy and have -> like software to edit photos. Bought once Corel AfterShot and using it for quite a long time now. So i do not want to give my money to Adobe or any other company each month/year because I DO NOT need new features or support for newer formats/cameras each time sth new comes to market.
One Time Payment is BETTER for user, and works great for offline software and stuff that doesnt need to change often.
but…
Here we comes to software that NEED to be changed often. Social media platforms are evolving each day, both “corporate” and “fedi” are changing, users want to have new features not only on API level but also on website and mobile clients… That takes time and costs each month.
Security software like Password Managers need to be updated, mail clients, messaging apps, all software that is mostly working on Internet basis need to be verified and updated very often for security and features. This costs.
ALSO you can say “Lets get back to im buying software ONCE and get 1 year of support and if i want i can buy another time” – it would be nice. But there is no option for that in ANY mobile platform. All bigs -> Google Play, Apple Store, Amazon Fire Store, (is there anything more? Samsung ownstore? Huawei?) doesnt have such option like “buy support for x days only” also community based “stores” doesnt support it too. So software dev should do it by their own (time cost) OR release each year a new version of their “EA FIFA” game at 1st January ;-).
Now what with people that bought this 2002 edition at November? With promise of “1 year support” shoud dev give them free update to 2003 and find a way to cut out suport at november and go on… or “fuck it” and leave them with only one month?
hard time
So we need to develop new platform, teach people to use it, fight against Apple-Google duopoly to allow people to use it… and then we can even start thinking about this old model of software distribution. For now we are forced to use subscription model.
Look at all the greatest software that was on mobile as “One Time Payment” -> Endomondo Pro becomes … subscription and then died. Locus Pro becomes … subscription and still lives somehow, also I have over 20 apps that i bought for Android. NONE of them is still supported. Developers stopped working on, studios have been closed OR they abadonned this software and created new apps in Sub model.
Why? Because it is NOW the only way to earn money from mobile software development.
We – developers – are not Twitter. There will be no banks, investors etc throwing money on us just to keep our projects alive to destroy democracy… (until there will be some Troll that buy stocks and push people out of the platform). We need to eat, we need to pay rent, we want to read book or have family. So we need to find way to pay this with customers cash.
You are mad for number of Ads on Youtube but will not pay cash for YT Premium. Also you want google to pay to authors of content… but not to see Ads. right? Think about It.