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I wonder what effect this will have on paid downloads. Offerings may rise, but I suspect demand will slightly drop for current ones. I've always felt very com

I wonder what effect this will have on paid downloads. Offerings may rise, but I suspect demand will slightly drop for current ones. I've always felt very comfortable making purchases from the Android store due to the gracious refund policy. Now there is a small fear of buying a crappy application and being interrupted before testing it out. An hour may have been a better compromise.

jamesaguilar 16y ago
When the price of an app is a dollar, it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of risk. If the game sucks, ah well, you're only out a dollar. For more expensive apps it's possible there will be some more risk, but I find that I typically don't know the true value of an expensive app until I have been using it for some time. I think it would have been interesting if they had made the refund available (1 hour * ceil(price in dollars)) from the time of purchase, but realistically I think the simple solution is sufficient.
- zitterbewegung 16y ago
  Implementing 1 hour * ceil(price in dollars) would be much harder since you would have to have a time value for each app. I imagine this might be a nightmare or at least a nontrivial thing to do.
  - jamesaguilar 16y ago
    Tracking one additional dependent attribute per app and checking it during the refund flow would be non-trivial? I can't see why.
- smashing 16y ago
  I would respectfully disagree. I believe that basically customers are cheap, and the lower the price needed to purchase, the cheaper customers will behave, resulting in a higher incidents of refund requests. Of course, I write this without having at my disposal neither any empirical evidence to back me up nor to the contrary of my position.
ergo98 16y ago
Agreed about the hour over 15 minutes. I can understand that they don't want people essentially renting apps for free (which is what was happening with a lot of casual games). On the flip side I bought a racing game recently and not long into playing it realized that it was just too frustrating -- the blame laying entirely on halting GC that is just destructive to gameplay, hence why it's fixed in 2.3 -- so I returned it. That was likely 20 minutes after installing.

jamesaguilar 16y ago

When the price of an app is a dollar, it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of risk. If the game sucks, ah well, you're only out a dollar. For more expensive apps it's possible there will be some more risk, but I find that I typically don't know the true value of an expensive app until I have been using it for some time. I think it would have been interesting if they had made the refund available (1 hour * ceil(price in dollars)) from the time of purchase, but realistically I think the simple solution is sufficient.

zitterbewegung 16y ago
Implementing 1 hour * ceil(price in dollars) would be much harder since you would have to have a time value for each app. I imagine this might be a nightmare or at least a nontrivial thing to do.
- jamesaguilar 16y ago
  Tracking one additional dependent attribute per app and checking it during the refund flow would be non-trivial? I can't see why.
smashing 16y ago
I would respectfully disagree. I believe that basically customers are cheap, and the lower the price needed to purchase, the cheaper customers will behave, resulting in a higher incidents of refund requests. Of course, I write this without having at my disposal neither any empirical evidence to back me up nor to the contrary of my position.

ergo98 16y ago

Agreed about the hour over 15 minutes. I can understand that they don't want people essentially renting apps for free (which is what was happening with a lot of casual games). On the flip side I bought a racing game recently and not long into playing it realized that it was just too frustrating -- the blame laying entirely on halting GC that is just destructive to gameplay, hence why it's fixed in 2.3 -- so I returned it. That was likely 20 minutes after installing.