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They get 30% of every sale in the app store - and the more and better apps they have, the more attractive it makes their app store. That's far from nothing.
But this is a discussion about free apps, so those more and better free apps just cost them even more money and don’t pay for themselves. Instead the 30% from commercial apps pay for the storage and bandwidth to distribute the free apps, as well as the fulfillment costs for the paid apps.
 
Subscription models were driven by apple App Store policies to drive additional spending and App Store fees toward apple. It was not some invisible neutral market force but an idea from the top to extract even more value from those at the bottom.

I really hope society evolves away from this horrifically misguided market based thinking
Both the app developer and Apple benefit from a switch from single to recurring purchases. You the consumer ends up paying more.
 
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BUT, nothing, Nothing, NOTHING, N-O-T-H-I-N-G will ever match the feeling of me hopping in my truck as a 20 year old, driving over an hour to CompUSA, talking with the Apple employee in the back corner of the store (who I still talk with today), buying software and Mac OS X or iLife and iWork **IN A BOX** and driving home like a kid at Christmas just waiting to take the disc out and install it while watching the blue Aqua progress bar tell me how quickly it would be before I got to use my new software.

Those were the good ’ol days. At least then, with that much time, effort, and gas put into getting a new piece of software, you stuck with an app and its upgrades for several years instead of the cycle of finding the latest and greatest every other month.
I love this. You’re right, there was effort, and enjoyment.
 
I'd love to see some numbers. "Number of app downloads per year, over time". And "Number of apps in use per device over time" (possibly country/region specific).

My gut feeling is that people are installing and using far fever apps than they used to when apps were all the rage.
I could be wrong.
 
Anyone else trying to isolate and save that photo of the app store icon for an ICNS file, don't bother, it'll be too small, I already tried.



PNG image 2.PNG
 
Ew, you used to be a moderator here?
I was.

What part of Apple is inexpensive? Their earliest products were expensive and they're probably the least expensive right now, but they're still expensive.

I've worked with the 18-20 year old crowd lately. This is a group that can't pay their bills, but has money for US$500 tattoos and US$200 worth of in-game upgrades. They have to take a daily pay withdrawal to eat.

Can they afford the computer they need to develop free software?
 
At least it would make sense, if the selection is based on revenue.
Well yes. I didn’t realise that, and it’s not titled that, there’s no reference to the financial year. I assumed it was most popular or best quality, not most revenue generating. Another lesson in one should never assume.
 
I was.

What part of Apple is inexpensive? Their earliest products were expensive and they're probably the least expensive right now, but they're still expensive.

I've worked with the 18-20 year old crowd lately. This is a group that can't pay their bills, but has money for US$500 tattoos and US$200 worth of in-game upgrades. They have to take a daily pay withdrawal to eat.

Can they afford the computer they need to develop free software?
Perhaps survival of the fittest should play a stake here.
 
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Both the app developer and Apple benefit from a switch from single to recurring purchases. You the consumer ends up paying more.
Shareholders are the customers, end users are the consumers, and games etc. are the content. The more content consumers consume, the richer the customers get.
 
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