I view a subscription as a way of saying "I support the developer in what they are doing, and wish to continue supporting them financially so they can continue to work on the app for the near foreseeable future".
Counterpoint: pre-app store models of revenue generation notwithstanding (keep reading), we now have Patreon as a way of supporting a creator. Creators include software developers. If their product, the application, shines, then the creator gets supported financially and incentivizes them to continue cultivating their work.
Personally, I am a tad disheartened to see that even as people spend more on hardware, they seem even more reluctant to spend on good software, which is really what makes your hardware's capabilities shine.
That is the nature of what app stores retrained end-users to value most. It is, of course, a devil’s bargain, in that “free” within those walled gardens ushers a considerable collection of user data. “Free” gets often coupled with ads and disabling subroutines which need to be “unlocked” (like a game achievement), via microtransaction, in order for a user-consumer to assess whether the unlocked version is all it was sold to be.
The app store model also facilitated disruption in the user-creator relationship with an aggressively, necessarily capital-oriented model.
It’s a model which, as a side-benefit, compensates developers
in part for some of their work, but a disproportionate wedge of that revenue pie goes to the app store’s company and, thus, to shareholders whose fiduciary (and often solitary) interest is in extracting the most
exchange-value possible from a revenue-generating structure, such as an app store (which is sold to shareholders as an efficient vehicle for delivering minimal exposure to “risk” for money they invested in ownership shares).
Developers
were making money prior to the invention of app stores. They were doing so without ceding significant chunks of revenue to a third party. There were different models of generating that revenue: as solely
commercial products; as
shareware products; and as
donationware products. Freeware was also an option, especially for fledgling developers who were offering what they coded on an
as-is basis. (This is also how they found their swimming legs.)
What this also meant was there were fewer applications or utilities for aggregating, say, RSS feeds (when another application, like a browser, didn’t supply that as an integral feature). But those which delivered that feed in a very handy, standalone way had the grounds to adopt one of those three models of revenue generation, as they so sought.
Now, as many (though not all) applications are no longer actual binaries insomuch as they’re either Electron wrappers around a web portal or encapsulated scripts scarcely more sophisticated than an Applescript in a tidy, self-contained executable, the “app” ecosystem enables all manners of aggressive competition over the
eyeballs of app store users.
[Sidebar: App stores also enable questionable activity by parties which use the app store model to overpromise, under-deliver, and charge for it as a requirement for an app user to access what was promised (whether or not the promise was true). Yes, an app store can kick and ban that party and yes, app stores have made public overtures to make that harder to pull off, but all that booted party needs to do is to sign on with a fresh profile to do the same, with a different “app”, once again. Expecting this fraudulent cycle is
baked into their own moneymaking scheme. In some cases, this
may include organized crime, better known as cyber-criminals.]
App makers, both legitimate and illegitimate, barrage search results to clamour to the top of a “download me first, and oh, if you like this, you can get the ‘pro’ version for $3.99” list. This doesn’t make it terribly straightforward for a user to figure out, as a glance, whether other apps can do the same task, but better, and without the smoke and mirrors of “free to try” or other tacit enticements attached (like user/usage telemetry whose disclosure of collection is often implied or “just a given”). Search results determine which apps get seen first, and search results can (and often are) paid for — sometimes as “Sponsored”, other times not.
Once, there may have been one or two, very well thought-out standalone RSS feed aggregators, and they did what they did well.
If there were two or three, they competed and improved on their products. Word of mouth got around, as did a search to find them (back when SEO was not yet a tool to game results and obviate the point of a
search engine with an
advertising engine). If they adopted a revenue model, they got paid by those who supported and appreciated their work. Banking exchange fees aside, they got nearly all of that support without a third party pulling out 20, 30, or even 40 per cent.
So yes, a reluctance for some to spend a few dollars on good software comes from a conditioning around oblique language like “free to try”, “free to play”, and “free*” (free-asterisk) as they pore through SEO-gamed search results in their app store — with variations on “free” bombarding them in most of the top search hits.
Entire generations, now hitting age of majority, have only ever been treated as “consumers, not as “users”. They have, generally, known of no other software model than an app store’s “walled garden”. Some older users, aware of other ways of doing developer-user business, know there are other ways of compensating good development, but nevetheless prefer the convenience of not having to put effort into finding them. Enter the app store.
There is no free lunch. App store middle-players — Apple, Google, Samsung, Epic — want developers to know that acutely and would prefer consumers not be reminded of it. Consequently, app makers, some of them bona fide developers, now fight each other over consumer eyeballs. It’s a race to the bottom for getting those eyeballs. Shareholders, via the company, stand to benefit over all this. Consumers get left with illusion of choice and, in most cases, are going to be drawn to whichever app offerer is best at grabbing those eyeballs — not the best tool for the job.
We made our bed like this. That means having to sleep in it. This is not a sustainable or healthy bargain for either bona fide developers or for end users.
