Agreed. I could understand if they went their own cloud like Day One and other applications - but using iCloud costs $0. I'm not sure what "cloud" they're using for their new store template but... that was surprising to me to see an iCloud sync application go subscription.
Oh is that right? Notability only uses iCloud syncing? Well…it that case it seems like having old users grandfathered in won’t cause any issues regarding having to pay for their storage.
Yes, my biggest issue too is with having to keep track of subscriptions and watching for price increases. That’s a big no-no in my book.
The built-in Notes app costs $0 and is perfectly good at taking notes. And it even syncs them with the cloud for $0.
Personal experience.....Apple does exactly the same thing with movies and TV series that you "purchase"... if they loose the rights to the movie then the movie gets deleted from your library.
I think there are places for subscription apps. The obvious one is apps that provide content like music or television. Even a note taking app could be subscription but that’s a totally different clientele. People that bought it off subscription might be just someone that needs to take an occasional note. If you’re buying on subscription and then you probably are someone who needs to do it every day or maybe for work. I often buy apps that I don’t use very much so paying for subscriptions wouldn’t work for me. It has to be something I use every day and that’s not many apps
I've got nothing against them trying to feed their families. But I do have a problem when they decide to feed their families by taking me for a sucker. After all, I've got a family as well, and I don't see why I should put their families ahead of mine. I'd rather buy my kid an ice cream, than throw that money down the drain just so somebody else can buy their kid an ice cream.
It's not about how often you use it. A product is a product, no matter how often you use it. If I buy a hammer, I expect to be able to use it every single day if I so wish, without having to pay a perpetual fee to Harbour Freight for the rest of my life.
The counterpoint to your argument would be that the hammer you buy at Harbor freight isn’t updated every month. If harbor freight came out every month and adjusted it to make it better then they would have to charge for that.
Fair enough. But I'm not demanding that they update the app free of charge forever. I have no problem with paid updates. All I demand is that I can use whatever I've bought for as long as I wish (or as long as it is technically possible to do so - e.g. until a major change happens in the operating system that breaks its functionality).
That's also not right. Adobe was the first, or among the first, who took this shameless step of forcing customers to subscribe to their product. I will never accept that. Even if I were a professional photographer, I would buy and use something else just to spite them, because I despise their business model.
I'd say if they cared about their customers they wouldn't have tried to do it in the first place. It's more like they got such an angry response from people who bought software and got told it was only rented. It seems like an excellent app but that was a dirty trick they tried to do
Which shows they A. Listen to their customers, and B. Care about their customers. Otherwise, they would have left it as a subscription model.
Or C. Realized that what they wanted to do would break the AppStore rules, and possibly the law as well.
I don’t know the App Store rules or laws well enough to have an opinion. I just know they offer a great app and reversed course which shows they listen and care enough so as not to lose more customers.
I imagine all that stuff is automated - based on activity. My guess is that there's a lot of Notability users and it created a lot of activity on the App Store. (My guess).
Thankfully, they reversed that step, but now that they tried this stunt, my confidence in them has dropped very low and I am not sure what to expect: lower support in the future ? support for a new version of the OS only for subscription users ? existing features disappearing, replaced by "a better implementation, for subscription users only" ?
