4 ms·

We're really torturing the metaphor with app updates as coffee refills, buuuuuut.... Many of us are in the software business. So we know how hard the stuff c

We're really torturing the metaphor with app updates as coffee refills, buuuuuut.... Many of us are in the software business. So we know how hard the stuff can be. But the customer doesn't, and shouldn't care. I think it's reasonable for the customer to expect updates forever. Particularly because so often, we put out a product that has bugs and problems in it. The customer is sometimes already being fairly accepting being willing to pay for a product that has problems that are yet to be fixed. The app author also has the ability to release a new app if the features warrant. So no one is forcing the publisher to give new features for free.

ben1040 9y ago
>The app author also has the ability to release a new app if the features warrant. That's easier said than done. You can't really do this without losing your customer base, links to your app in the store, sign-in tokens, etc, and you have to have some mechanism for migrating data out of one app sandbox to the other. Additionally, if you want to be fair and offer an upgrade price, the app stores don't allow this directly. Tweetbot did something clever; they wanted to charge $10 for new users but $5 for upgrades. They put the "old" version and the "new" version in a package deal bundle on the iOS App Store, and priced the bundle at $10. If you had the "old" version already, you got get a discounted upgrade by buying the bundle -- since you already owned one app in the bundle, you got a credit for that towards the full price. The app stores could fix this problem and allow publishers to set upgrade pricing, but they don't.