So they would strip the App from it's functions, even iAPS? And you could only download the stripped down version in Purchased or App Store? That's worse than I thought.
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Notability Changes App Subscription Policy, Promises Existing Users Lifetime Access to Purchased Features
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This will surely hurt their projected calculations about how many people can be converted to the sustainable subscription model. Let's hope Notability can survive, and those users crying unfair don't end up losing the app forever.
Teachers can use this entire thread as a lesson in how cancel culture works. People are absurd sometimes and the comments here show it. Silly to expect a tiny company to support an app forever for one small up front payment that they get like 70% of in the first place.
This is how it should have been initially. Anyway glad that they are now allowing lifetime access to already paid members.
Purchases should cover two years of updates, NOT provide liftetime benefits !
The main problem with the App Store, & why companies like this are doing what they are doing, is they see little to NO unit sales growth.
i.e., due to market saturation; Apple's customer base hasn't really increased since the 2015 iPhone 6s & 6s+ were released.
Apple's obsession with Game Apps, & now also Apple Arcade, has resulted in the NON-Game portion of the App Store dying a slow death !
And, Apple's recent Privacy changes will accelerate it !
Who on this planet besides Tim Cook thinks that the team of Phil Schiller & Matt Fischer can Fix the App Store ?
It's NOT gonna happen with those two running the show !
The main problem with the App Store, & why companies like this are doing what they are doing, is they see little to NO unit sales growth.
i.e., due to market saturation; Apple's customer base hasn't really increased since the 2015 iPhone 6s & 6s+ were released.
Apple's obsession with Game Apps, & now also Apple Arcade, has resulted in the NON-Game portion of the App Store dying a slow death !
And, Apple's recent Privacy changes will accelerate it !
Who on this planet besides Tim Cook thinks that the team of Phil Schiller & Matt Fischer can Fix the App Store ?
It's NOT gonna happen with those two running the show !
Talk about timing. I just started testing GoodNotes 5 as a possible replacement for Notability -- which I've grown disappointed with on a number of items. Musta had a premonition...
Adobe needs to be stabbed in the eye for creating this subscription software model. Now, you can't even buy a timer app without a subscription...
Yes, that's why the people are outraged and why this is against Apple's guidelines, they cannot do this.
This is also why some people want the sideload ability, they want to maintain their apps that they bought and revert anytime they want.
Apple should not have the power to determine what version you can use.
I know, right? I can’t believe all these developers expect to be able to make a living off the thing that they do.
Seriously though, while I don’t think that every app needs to be a subscription and Notability absolutely made the switch the wrong way and has thankfully caved to the reasonable response, I also like when the apps I pay for are maintained. Subscriptions are sometimes the only way that can happen.
A massive problem with the App Store is that Apple conditioned users to think that every app should cost a dollar, and now people still think that something they use many times a day for years should be supported for eternity off the back of that one-time purchase they made three years ago. It’s just not a reasonable expectation.
Ultimately, if you don’t want to pay a subscription for something, look for an alternative, there’s almost always a free or pay-once option available, but also don’t be surprised when that developer ends support or sells their app to some big predatory company when they’re no longer able to pay rent.
Whether you agree with this statement or not is irrelevant.
The point is, before Notability went subscription only, people bought the app with the understanding that they would have access to it forever without a subscription.
Then the company decided to do a 180 and reverse that.
It's like if I start selling refrigerators with lifetime service contracts for $100, then five years later start billing customers $10 a year to continue the contract, and if they don't pay their refrigerator stops working completely.
Yes, I can't be expected to make a profit forever selling those contracts, but it was still my bad decision to do so. It's unethical for me to break my promise to previous purchasers who had an understanding they only had to pay once.
You are not getting the point. Nobody demands a lifetime support for the relatively small amount of money paid upfront.
Users are simply claiming not to remove functionalities for which they have paid via software update.
Simply create a new version, and stop supporting the old one.
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And this is the problem with the current model. Most apps have minor improvements and bug fixes, but little else. Notability in particular has become stagnant over the years -- as have many apps. So many improvement or feature requests get ignored. As an example, a line space tool like in OneNote has been a top request (with GoodNotes, too) for years. But to this date, nothing has been added.
Perhaps an ownership model ala Adobe Photoshop pre-subscription would be better. Buy a program now for a higher price, get bug fixes, but the developer continues to create new features for a new version that would entice people to pay a lesser upgrade fee. It used to be that Photoshop was incredibly expensive for the first purchase, but then you could upgrade to the latest version for a mere hundred bucks or so. The same idea could apply to apps, although obviously on a less expensive scale. To go down this path, developers would have to add a trial period, too, to give folks a reason to spend the money to get the increased value.
Spoken just like the mouth breathers that are vehemently against things like CRT, and yet know nothing of what it is. These are people who paid money for an app and being jerked around by the Dev and exercising their right to decry these actions. You might want to revisit your definitions of some terms. But then, I suspect this will fall on deaf ears and I'll get some reply about my mother's army boots or something.
IMO, subs didn't ruin the app pricing ecosystem, the app store revolution did.
In the past; there weren't 100k-1m apps available for everyone to consume and there wasn't a lot of competition along with a lot of marketing and ads either. People had to find software on their own. Trials was the key to demo and indie shops could stick with one platform developing high-quality apps for it.
Now, indie shops including companies have to develop for more than one platform (and multiple OS versions per platform) (thus why Electron has been steadily gaining control of the ecosystem on the desktops), throw in some marketing expenses, and fight against copycats thanks to the app store allowing any one to develop an app, regardless of any quality. It can be very easy for someone to just clone the app and make it work barebone.
(I understand some people only want to support the macOS shops producing such native macOS apps, keep in mind that macOS users is <10% of the overall desktop OS market and to this day, it may not be sustainable to keep working on them especially since apps have a saturation point where new features become much longer to develop or there's nothing to add)
Devs now have to complete on price because why would any customers look at 100$ app over a 50$ one and then 30$ app over 50$ app and the so on down to the last dollar. At some point, it became unsustainable. Going back to 30$ isn't an option, casual users today aren't going to look at it. It's easier to eat 1$ per month than 30$ one time.
Not to mention any potential recurring costs they have.
Developers are human beings that need to survive (I'm generalizing it, there are companies that are just evil but that's not really the majority of the app store right now (excluding profits)), that means they need to know if they'll be able to have food in a year or two.
Upgrades are very difficult to do / maintain compared to subscriptions. Keep in mind there are various types of subscriptions; subscriptions should be defaulting to allowing people to keep what they paid for with no features disappearing when they stopped paying. In other words, not like notability where they remove features. If you paid up to this month, all features added prior to this month should be yours to keep forever but not bug fixes nor support.
The reason developers love subscriptions is that they don't need to worry about putting aside new features to save for an upgrade, they don't need to do any prep work for major releases (licensing, marketing, support, etc). Plus subscription means they don't have to maintain any more than one version, and many more.
Upgrades are not coming back (at least in the form we used to know it), it's not sustainable for a lot of developers in this era of multiple devices, multiple platforms and so on.
Asking for upgrades means you're asking the developers to stop adding new features and simply fixes anything broken in the version you're using. They should not be giving you new features, period. Buying a version does not entitle you to future new features. This is the preconception that a lot of folks have that's not really realistic nor sustainable.
In the past; there weren't 100k-1m apps available for everyone to consume and there wasn't a lot of competition along with a lot of marketing and ads either. People had to find software on their own. Trials was the key to demo and indie shops could stick with one platform developing high-quality apps for it.
Now, indie shops including companies have to develop for more than one platform (and multiple OS versions per platform) (thus why Electron has been steadily gaining control of the ecosystem on the desktops), throw in some marketing expenses, and fight against copycats thanks to the app store allowing any one to develop an app, regardless of any quality. It can be very easy for someone to just clone the app and make it work barebone.
(I understand some people only want to support the macOS shops producing such native macOS apps, keep in mind that macOS users is <10% of the overall desktop OS market and to this day, it may not be sustainable to keep working on them especially since apps have a saturation point where new features become much longer to develop or there's nothing to add)
Devs now have to complete on price because why would any customers look at 100$ app over a 50$ one and then 30$ app over 50$ app and the so on down to the last dollar. At some point, it became unsustainable. Going back to 30$ isn't an option, casual users today aren't going to look at it. It's easier to eat 1$ per month than 30$ one time.
Not to mention any potential recurring costs they have.
Developers are human beings that need to survive (I'm generalizing it, there are companies that are just evil but that's not really the majority of the app store right now (excluding profits)), that means they need to know if they'll be able to have food in a year or two.
Upgrades are very difficult to do / maintain compared to subscriptions. Keep in mind there are various types of subscriptions; subscriptions should be defaulting to allowing people to keep what they paid for with no features disappearing when they stopped paying. In other words, not like notability where they remove features. If you paid up to this month, all features added prior to this month should be yours to keep forever but not bug fixes nor support.
The reason developers love subscriptions is that they don't need to worry about putting aside new features to save for an upgrade, they don't need to do any prep work for major releases (licensing, marketing, support, etc). Plus subscription means they don't have to maintain any more than one version, and many more.
Upgrades are not coming back (at least in the form we used to know it), it's not sustainable for a lot of developers in this era of multiple devices, multiple platforms and so on.
Asking for upgrades means you're asking the developers to stop adding new features and simply fixes anything broken in the version you're using. They should not be giving you new features, period. Buying a version does not entitle you to future new features. This is the preconception that a lot of folks have that's not really realistic nor sustainable.
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The conversation whenever an existing app goes subscription is always interesting to read, because every user is very different. I have always loved trying out new apps from the app store since it's beginning, but as many here have stated, I download so many fewer apps these days that even three years ago, because of the subscription craze.
My logical brain completely understands why these developers go this way. Of course, I'm old enough to remember going to an apple reseller and shopping the software shelves, where most boxes cost $50-80, and then there were the few big names that were >$200. I don't know exactly why the app store raced to the bottom with pricing, is it because it started with iPhone instead of iPad, or because Android exists, and no one in that ecosystem originally was even willing to spend $1.99 on anything??
However, here we are, and I bought Notability who knows how many years ago, and it sat on my iPad, mostly unused, simply because I didn't have a big need for it, in my line of work. I work on a Windows PC, any odds and ends get scribbled on a notepad, then tossed in the trash, and I go about my day. If I were in school, my needs would be completely different, likewise if I dealt face to face with clients every day, it would also be different, but I primarily deal in email, so I don't have to worry about that. Still, my eagerness to try stuff, resulted in a dilemma a while ago, on whether I should try GoodNotes out, and basically, since I already have Notability, barely used it, and did almost everything in Apple Notes, I decided I didn't need to shell out $8 for it.
Similarly, a few years ago, I flirted with switching from Apple Notes to Bear, as it was highly lauded at the time. The thing is, it was purely aesthetic. Bear looked nicer, and Apple still had that awful paper texture in notes at the time. But I could not bring myself to pay $1.50/month to sync notes between my devices just because it looked a little nicer than Apple's. In the end, I'm happy I made that choice, because now the texture is gone, and Apple notes has all of the pencil integration for handwriting as well.
In the end, I think that the cost of a subscription is really important. I want all of these apps to succeed for the audiences they have, but there are so many that I look at, and before I even hit the download button for the free version, I check the subscription costs. All of these mindfulness apps, health tracking apps, etc, they all are subscription based now, and I get it, they have people providing content on their network. But the idea of paying $60-99/year for any of these apps that often rely mostly on me entering my own content or data (vs. streaming subscriptions to which what I am paying for is entirely created by other people for my enjoyment) is laughable.
The thing that got me about Notability is that the new subscription is a yearly payment that is 50% higher than the original cost of the app. So, not only did they expect their base to pay for the app again every year, but they expected them to pay much more than many customers may have even been willing to pay in full once for the app at all. $15/year to enter text just seems exorbitant. This is a similar cost to Bear, I understand, but at face value even the discounted promotional rate was $12, $2 more than the app cost a week ago. I wonder how much actual research goes into successful app subscriptions. I wonder how well a similarly rated app that charges $5/year does vs one that charges $20/year, I feel like $5 is easy money to gamble for a year on an app, and you could easily exceed 5 interested parties for every 1 that is willing to pay for the $20 app. Add to that the good will from the community, as I guarantee you the reaction to Notability would not have been as negative if the annual subscription was LESS than the original app price.
My logical brain completely understands why these developers go this way. Of course, I'm old enough to remember going to an apple reseller and shopping the software shelves, where most boxes cost $50-80, and then there were the few big names that were >$200. I don't know exactly why the app store raced to the bottom with pricing, is it because it started with iPhone instead of iPad, or because Android exists, and no one in that ecosystem originally was even willing to spend $1.99 on anything??
However, here we are, and I bought Notability who knows how many years ago, and it sat on my iPad, mostly unused, simply because I didn't have a big need for it, in my line of work. I work on a Windows PC, any odds and ends get scribbled on a notepad, then tossed in the trash, and I go about my day. If I were in school, my needs would be completely different, likewise if I dealt face to face with clients every day, it would also be different, but I primarily deal in email, so I don't have to worry about that. Still, my eagerness to try stuff, resulted in a dilemma a while ago, on whether I should try GoodNotes out, and basically, since I already have Notability, barely used it, and did almost everything in Apple Notes, I decided I didn't need to shell out $8 for it.
Similarly, a few years ago, I flirted with switching from Apple Notes to Bear, as it was highly lauded at the time. The thing is, it was purely aesthetic. Bear looked nicer, and Apple still had that awful paper texture in notes at the time. But I could not bring myself to pay $1.50/month to sync notes between my devices just because it looked a little nicer than Apple's. In the end, I'm happy I made that choice, because now the texture is gone, and Apple notes has all of the pencil integration for handwriting as well.
In the end, I think that the cost of a subscription is really important. I want all of these apps to succeed for the audiences they have, but there are so many that I look at, and before I even hit the download button for the free version, I check the subscription costs. All of these mindfulness apps, health tracking apps, etc, they all are subscription based now, and I get it, they have people providing content on their network. But the idea of paying $60-99/year for any of these apps that often rely mostly on me entering my own content or data (vs. streaming subscriptions to which what I am paying for is entirely created by other people for my enjoyment) is laughable.
The thing that got me about Notability is that the new subscription is a yearly payment that is 50% higher than the original cost of the app. So, not only did they expect their base to pay for the app again every year, but they expected them to pay much more than many customers may have even been willing to pay in full once for the app at all. $15/year to enter text just seems exorbitant. This is a similar cost to Bear, I understand, but at face value even the discounted promotional rate was $12, $2 more than the app cost a week ago. I wonder how much actual research goes into successful app subscriptions. I wonder how well a similarly rated app that charges $5/year does vs one that charges $20/year, I feel like $5 is easy money to gamble for a year on an app, and you could easily exceed 5 interested parties for every 1 that is willing to pay for the $20 app. Add to that the good will from the community, as I guarantee you the reaction to Notability would not have been as negative if the annual subscription was LESS than the original app price.
I bet they will have new features so people will want to switch. They aren’t removing features, but I bet they aren’t going to add any unless you get the subscription.
There’s no need to support it forever. Make it compatible for the next couple of iterations of the OS, for example. Or make the next version of your attractive enough that people will buy it anyway.
Software developers somehow managed to make a living selling standalone programs for a long time.
I'm all for 'regular paid updates' over the subscription method. Every 2-3 years, release a new version with all new features and charge the value of the app for that purchase. Just like Microsoft office 95, 95, 2000, etc. If you want to upgrade, great. If you don't, then you never lose what you already paid for.
No one wants to be shoehorned into a subscription model where you lose complete access once you stop paying.
No one wants to be shoehorned into a subscription model where you lose complete access once you stop paying.
Things have changed.
Consumers expect 24/7 support and instant fixes. You used to wait weeks or months for updates to programs you bought for $100+. Now if a bug isn’t fixed in a few days, apps can get 1-star reviews and mass uninstalls.
There are more things that need to be constantly updated too. If a tool build by another company changes and your app breaks, that’s a fix you need to make. If a new phone has a different resolution, that’s an update you need to make. If Apple changes a rule, you need to make sure your app isn’t going to get pulled.
The things that used to be nice-to-haves are table stakes now, and that takes resources.
Things have changed, sure, but I don't know that I agree that they've changed a whole lot in the big picture when it comes to total costs of business.
Back in the day, you had to worry about (or pay somebody to worry about) packaging and box art, distribution, physical media creation, writing and printing proper and exhaustively complete documentation (modern FAQs and wikis don't even come close), dealing with the cost of inventory that didn't sell, storage, focusing extensively on quality assurance so you don't have to ship with bugs that need patched, phone support, printed advertising, etc.
Both software development then and now require resources, just at different times and in different places.
I don't see a reason to change that instinct. Ginger Labs has shown their willingness to pull a stunt like this, I don't have any trust they won't find some other incremental way to the same goal. I've removed it from all my devices and am experimenting with GoodNotes and the basic Apple Notes to choose an alternative.
