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Apple this afternoon shared a new "Insights" video on its developer site that is designed to highlight the benefits of using App Store subscriptions as a payment method for apps.
The video focuses on the developers behind Elevate, Dropbox, Calm, and Bumble and how these apps "create great customer experiences by continuing to provide value throughout the subscription lifecycle."
"The value for a user is that you're not just buying this one thing at this one point in time, you're actually buying something that's evolving," said Elevate developer Jesse Germinario.
"If you're a subscription business, your incentives are actually perfectly aligned with your customers, because they need to continue to get value out of the product in order to keep subscribing, which means that you have to continue making the app better," said Calm developer Tyler Sheaffer.
Apple's efforts to push developers to embrace subscriptions were first highlighted last month when Business Insider shared details on a secret meeting held in April 2017.
At the meeting, Apple hosted more than 30 software developers and encouraged them to adopt subscription payment models.
Apple told developers that the app model is changing, with paid apps representing just 15 percent of total app sales, a number that is declining. Successful apps, Apple said, need to focus on subscriptions and regular engagement from users rather than one time sales.
Apple's video on app subscriptions can be watched on the company's developer website.
Top Rated Comments
The only time I feel like a subscription is appropriate is when the app is basically a service; for example RadarScope; you're paying for the data on their servers and that's great.
But apps that don't depend on a service really should be a one time purchase, with occasional paid upgrades. Pixelmator is a good example of that.
There are apps for which subscriptions make sense (non-ad-supported content delivery like Netflix, non-ad-supported continual services like server hosting, and otherwise unaffordable software like Maya), and there are those that do not (pretty much everything else).
Make a good app, charge a fair one time price. Make updated versions, let people pay to upgrade as they see fit. They don’t pay, they’re stuck with what they got—fair. This ending up with nothing once you stop paying no matter how long you’ve been paying is ridiculous. If people want to remain on older software on older devices indefinitely, that should be up to them. And this starting out with incomplete apps, and getting people to pay you while you slowly build it out is ridiculous. And this forcing data from my device to go a thousand miles away to your server then back to my other device sitting 2 feet away instead of just letting it sync (possibly selectively) over my WiFi just so that you can charge a subscription (and who knows, data mine)—ridiculous.
There are two opposite extremes of this spectrum. One is entitlement, as you say. The other is unnecessary subscription models. Reason lies somewhere in between.
Developers need to eat and pay bills just like the rest of us.
Many of the people on this forum need to stop their complaining and take a long cool drink of cold reality, instead of the entitlement latte.
Also not mentioned in this "insights" video is how subscriptions also actively benefit Apple, as they take either 30% or 15% (after the first year).
I hate how so many companies are moving to subscriptions, Apple shouldn't be helping this cause.