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I have a different view of this than most in this topic. I am disappointed, though not surprised, that Panic is abandoning yet another of their iOS apps. They’v

I have a different view of this than most in this topic. I am disappointed, though not surprised, that Panic is abandoning yet another of their iOS apps. They’ve done it several times before and while I am grateful they’ve continued to provide some bug fixes, feature work stopped years ago. In my view, the biggest hurdle does not seem to have been technical, but ideological/business. These old school Mac developers like Panic and Omni have had a very difficult time adapting to (or failing to) the iOS/mobile era. I know we all hate subscriptions, but continued app development and management requires continued labor so subscriptions seem like the only business option that makes any sense to me. Panic and Omni want paid upgrades but Apple has never, ever even hinted at providing that as an option. The option is subscriptions. Even on desktop Sketch, Adobe, and Microsoft are going with subscriptions. (We’ll see how Affinity does. They charge a lot more for their apps and seem to be in a growth phase so I imagine their sales at the moment are fast enough to make up for the fact that each sale is only a one time source of revenue). Honestly, Panic and Omni and other old school Mac developers really, really need to adapt to the modern era. They’ve had years and it feels like the runway is about to end (see Omni’s recent layoffs.) Wishing for paid upgrades and writing “only AppKit apps are real Mac apps” blog posts isn’t going to change anything.

addicted 5y ago
Can you point to indie developers that have been successful developing iOS apps, etc? The likes of Microsoft and Adobe, whose strategy isn't to sell products as much as it is to establish and maintain market control, are not good comparisons.
egeozcan 5y ago
Many developers just release new apps as "upgrades", or lock new features behind in app purchases to remedy the no-upgrades problem. I think that only cannot be the reason. I think there's just too many free alternatives in code editors and you have to be really amazing (like jetbrains) to be able to make users pay.
cloogshicer 5y ago
The problem is that many people, even in developer circles like here on HN, are still very negative when it comes to subscriptions. From a consumer point of view that's understandable: Everyone wants to keep their recurring costs low. But from a developer point of view, this is an antiquated way of thinking about software. Software that is not actively maintained (which is expensive) eventually stops working. Even more so on platforms like iOS, where you're beholden to the whims of the platform OS. So you need recurring revenue to offset that maintenance cost. I wish consumers would understand this better.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  I wish businesses would understand that inflicting subscriptions on consumers is a lot more onerous than they think. A subscription means one has to use the software they paid for. You can't have it sit on a shelf for those once-every-few-months use cases. It means having to manage a million stupid business relationships with vendors that one doesn't want to have to deal with. It means trolling credit card statements after-the-fact to make sure the subscription was actually cancelled when that comes time, and it means dealing with the cancellation process (and whatever dark patterns the vendor throws down) on a fairly regular basis. The old paid-updates model isn't "antiquated", it's customer-centric. Subscriptions are the opposite: customer-hostile. The service worker earning minimum wage can't afford a million subscriptions. Your subscription means they are a lost customer, and it means they cannot invest in their future in a way that they can effectively control their costs. It's a great way to get your stuff pirated. Photoshop is a great deal at a fixed cost of $1000 or whatever it was, because when I needed it it was there for me and I knew it would solve my problem. Photoshop cloud is a fucking rip off, I'm not going to pay their ridiculous monthly fees, nor deal with their onerous subscription terms, for an app I use maybe once every six months. I don't want to live in a future where I am beholden to a million rent-seeking wantrepreneurs because they forgot how to finance their business the old-fashioned way, or because they are afraid of being "antiquated" The SAAS mentality really, really, really needs to die.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    > Photoshop is a great deal at a fixed cost of $1000 or whatever it was, because when I needed it it was there for me and I knew it would solve my problem. Photoshop cloud is a fucking rip off, I'm not going to pay their ridiculous monthly fees, nor deal with their onerous subscription terms, for an app I use maybe once every six months. How is paying $1000 better than paying $32 every six months and getting access for the entire month? $1000 better if you'll use it for 30 months without interruptions but it sounds like that's not your use-case.
robenkleene 5y ago
The post gives an specific technical limitation for why Nova wouldn't be possible due to iOS apps store policies. So they wouldn't be able to make a subscription version even if they wanted to? > The biggest technical hurdle is the inability to run external processes on iOS and iPadOS. There’s just no way around it: this is required for modern web development. For example, the TypeScript extension is one of the most popular Nova extensions right now, and it launches and runs the TypeScript compiler. While we could attempt to build the TypeScript compiler into Nova, we can’t possibly anticipate and include every such tool that might be needed by a developer. We’d need to bundle compilers, interpreters, and language servers for just about every programming language in existence, not to mention tools like linters, JavaScript transpilers, and bundlers. The scope would quickly become unmanageable, and we’d always be lagging behind the latest versions of these tools.
- lacker 5y ago
  That complaint doesn't quite make sense to me because things like "language servers for every programming language in existence" don't exist for iOS in the first place, even if you were allowed to run external processes. To me the logical solution is something like Replit, where your arbitrary programming environment is running off-device. You want to program Go or Python on your iPad? Okay, but the actual code is executing in some cloud machine. Apple should be happy with that, and it'll be a lot easier to maintain all this stuff off-device anyway, than on iPads, where nobody else is maintaining a toolchain. Of course that doesn't work with a "one-time-purchase" business model....
  - robenkleene 5y ago
    > That complaint doesn't quite make sense to me because things like "language servers for every programming language in existence" don't exist iOS in the first place, even if you were allowed to run external processes. Yes, they do exist for iOS, they're the existing language servers. iOS is Unix on ARM, it can run most of (all of?) the Node ecosystem (including the existing LSP implementations) just fine. The problem is Apple doesn’t provide the APIs to run them, and bans apps that create their own workarounds to run them (unless they’re in the app bundle, which my understanding is allowed, e.g., that’s how something like play.js works https://playdotjs.com/ https://playdotjs.com/).
Doches 5y ago
> Honestly, Panic and Omni and other old school Mac developers really, really need to adapt to the modern era. A counterpoint: how intense would the outcry be if Panic were to make the next versions of Transmit & Coda subscription only (the Mac versions, that is, not their baby iOS counterparts)? I'm probably almost a model Panic customer -- I've paid for every major version of both at release, along with Prompt & Coda for iOS -- but even I'd balk at paying a subscription for a code editor. A paid upgrade every few years? Sure, take my money (see also: Jetbrains). But a monthly subscription for a tool that updates only semi-frequently (e.g. Transmit)? Yeah, I'm out. Developers (and tech folks in general) are the cheapest, orneriest market. How can I justify to myself a monthly sub to Transmit & Coda when scp & VSCode are free?
- lacker 5y ago
  Adobe had an intense outcry when they moved to a subscription model, and it worked out great for them. You are basically changing your customer base. People who would happily spend $20/month for a good code editor will love the change to a subscription model in the long run, because it lets you invest more effort in making the product great. And I think there are a lot of those people - if you spend hours and hours every day programming, and you make good money at your job, aren't you willing to spend money to use the best tools? People who don't want to buy a subscription will be angry, but in a couple months they won't be your customer any more so it won't matter that they're angry.
  - ben174 5y ago
    For some crazy reason Photoshop users are so crazy loyal to that product they're willing to pay for it. I'm totally guilty of this, just yesterday I needed to scale and crop an image and I had to download the whole Creative Cloud installer to my new laptop and install Photoshop. I'm positive I could have done this in a number of different tools even built into the OS, but for whatever reason I'm just hooked on Photoshop.
    - granshaw 5y ago
      FYI If you’re on a Mac you can do that right in Preview
zepto 5y ago
Omni in particular started off very strong on iOS but failed to adapt their products. Their failure to support the system file sharing / iCloud for so long was a killer for me. They were simply technically wrong about how to do it. There are many other ways in which they simply failed to adapt as the model changed, which I find perplexing.
Cyberdog 5y ago
There's a tool I use called Dash for quickly looking up documentation of coding languages and frameworks and it works offline. It does not have a subscription model, but it does have very frequent paid upgrades; without charting them out, I'd guess they are roughly yearly. I grumble every time because the upgrade cost isn't cheap and the updates rarely have groundbreaking new features, but then I consider how much use I get out of that tool and hand my dollars over. But the times when money has been tight or I've just been lazy and haven't upgraded when a new release comes out, the old one continues to work just fine. I'd much rather see Panic and other developers use a model like this; trick/incentivize me into re-buying your product every year without calling it a subscription or breaking my old versions. I used Coda pretty much since its launch and paid for upgrades to Coda 2 and Nova. I've built my career around these editors, so it's kind of scandalous how little I've paid Panic in proportion to how much money I've made using them. I would be fine with them having more frequent paid upgrades. But the day they try to rope me into a forced subscription model is the day I start looking at alternatives (which is too bad, because the last time I looked at the market when Coda 2 was getting a bit too long in the tooth and it was looking like Nova was never going to actually be released, it was clear that there are no serious alternatives for Mac-native code editors out there except for maybe the crusty old BBEdit, which I do not have fond memories of).
- Hammershaft 5y ago
  The problem here is that Apple does not support that license upgrade model for iOS.
ashneo76 5y ago
Sorry. Subscription isn't for me. I don't want to be in a jail of non ownership as an illusion. Please stop calling this as modern model. This is modern daylight theft
vr46 5y ago
I agree completely. Panic have, to be blunt, screwed me over about four times with various pieces of software over the last decade on both iOS and Mac, and Omni are not exactly much better. As cool and shiny as a lot of their software looks, I cannot trust them enough to buy the thing when I know that they will abandon support at the drop of a hat.
panicsocks 5y ago
> panic is abandoning yet another of their iOS apps Exactly. I don’t understand why anyone would buy their apps. For the money you’ll get an app riddled with bugs, zero useful updates that actually fix those bugs, and near zero support from panic. It happens over and over and over again. I guess I thought the saying started with “fool me thrice” because it took that long for me to figure it out. :/

addicted 5y ago

Can you point to indie developers that have been successful developing iOS apps, etc? The likes of Microsoft and Adobe, whose strategy isn't to sell products as much as it is to establish and maintain market control, are not good comparisons.

egeozcan 5y ago

Many developers just release new apps as "upgrades", or lock new features behind in app purchases to remedy the no-upgrades problem. I think that only cannot be the reason. I think there's just too many free alternatives in code editors and you have to be really amazing (like jetbrains) to be able to make users pay.

cloogshicer 5y ago

The problem is that many people, even in developer circles like here on HN, are still very negative when it comes to subscriptions. From a consumer point of view that's understandable: Everyone wants to keep their recurring costs low. But from a developer point of view, this is an antiquated way of thinking about software. Software that is not actively maintained (which is expensive) eventually stops working. Even more so on platforms like iOS, where you're beholden to the whims of the platform OS. So you need recurring revenue to offset that maintenance cost. I wish consumers would understand this better.

tomc1985 5y ago
I wish businesses would understand that inflicting subscriptions on consumers is a lot more onerous than they think. A subscription means one has to use the software they paid for. You can't have it sit on a shelf for those once-every-few-months use cases. It means having to manage a million stupid business relationships with vendors that one doesn't want to have to deal with. It means trolling credit card statements after-the-fact to make sure the subscription was actually cancelled when that comes time, and it means dealing with the cancellation process (and whatever dark patterns the vendor throws down) on a fairly regular basis. The old paid-updates model isn't "antiquated", it's customer-centric. Subscriptions are the opposite: customer-hostile. The service worker earning minimum wage can't afford a million subscriptions. Your subscription means they are a lost customer, and it means they cannot invest in their future in a way that they can effectively control their costs. It's a great way to get your stuff pirated. Photoshop is a great deal at a fixed cost of $1000 or whatever it was, because when I needed it it was there for me and I knew it would solve my problem. Photoshop cloud is a fucking rip off, I'm not going to pay their ridiculous monthly fees, nor deal with their onerous subscription terms, for an app I use maybe once every six months. I don't want to live in a future where I am beholden to a million rent-seeking wantrepreneurs because they forgot how to finance their business the old-fashioned way, or because they are afraid of being "antiquated" The SAAS mentality really, really, really needs to die.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  > Photoshop is a great deal at a fixed cost of $1000 or whatever it was, because when I needed it it was there for me and I knew it would solve my problem. Photoshop cloud is a fucking rip off, I'm not going to pay their ridiculous monthly fees, nor deal with their onerous subscription terms, for an app I use maybe once every six months. How is paying $1000 better than paying $32 every six months and getting access for the entire month? $1000 better if you'll use it for 30 months without interruptions but it sounds like that's not your use-case.

robenkleene 5y ago

The post gives an specific technical limitation for why Nova wouldn't be possible due to iOS apps store policies. So they wouldn't be able to make a subscription version even if they wanted to? > The biggest technical hurdle is the inability to run external processes on iOS and iPadOS. There’s just no way around it: this is required for modern web development. For example, the TypeScript extension is one of the most popular Nova extensions right now, and it launches and runs the TypeScript compiler. While we could attempt to build the TypeScript compiler into Nova, we can’t possibly anticipate and include every such tool that might be needed by a developer. We’d need to bundle compilers, interpreters, and language servers for just about every programming language in existence, not to mention tools like linters, JavaScript transpilers, and bundlers. The scope would quickly become unmanageable, and we’d always be lagging behind the latest versions of these tools.

lacker 5y ago
That complaint doesn't quite make sense to me because things like "language servers for every programming language in existence" don't exist for iOS in the first place, even if you were allowed to run external processes. To me the logical solution is something like Replit, where your arbitrary programming environment is running off-device. You want to program Go or Python on your iPad? Okay, but the actual code is executing in some cloud machine. Apple should be happy with that, and it'll be a lot easier to maintain all this stuff off-device anyway, than on iPads, where nobody else is maintaining a toolchain. Of course that doesn't work with a "one-time-purchase" business model....
- robenkleene 5y ago
  > That complaint doesn't quite make sense to me because things like "language servers for every programming language in existence" don't exist iOS in the first place, even if you were allowed to run external processes. Yes, they do exist for iOS, they're the existing language servers. iOS is Unix on ARM, it can run most of (all of?) the Node ecosystem (including the existing LSP implementations) just fine. The problem is Apple doesn’t provide the APIs to run them, and bans apps that create their own workarounds to run them (unless they’re in the app bundle, which my understanding is allowed, e.g., that’s how something like play.js works https://playdotjs.com/ https://playdotjs.com/).

Doches 5y ago

> Honestly, Panic and Omni and other old school Mac developers really, really need to adapt to the modern era. A counterpoint: how intense would the outcry be if Panic were to make the next versions of Transmit & Coda subscription only (the Mac versions, that is, not their baby iOS counterparts)? I'm probably almost a model Panic customer -- I've paid for every major version of both at release, along with Prompt & Coda for iOS -- but even I'd balk at paying a subscription for a code editor. A paid upgrade every few years? Sure, take my money (see also: Jetbrains). But a monthly subscription for a tool that updates only semi-frequently (e.g. Transmit)? Yeah, I'm out. Developers (and tech folks in general) are the cheapest, orneriest market. How can I justify to myself a monthly sub to Transmit & Coda when scp & VSCode are free?

lacker 5y ago
Adobe had an intense outcry when they moved to a subscription model, and it worked out great for them. You are basically changing your customer base. People who would happily spend $20/month for a good code editor will love the change to a subscription model in the long run, because it lets you invest more effort in making the product great. And I think there are a lot of those people - if you spend hours and hours every day programming, and you make good money at your job, aren't you willing to spend money to use the best tools? People who don't want to buy a subscription will be angry, but in a couple months they won't be your customer any more so it won't matter that they're angry.
- ben174 5y ago
  For some crazy reason Photoshop users are so crazy loyal to that product they're willing to pay for it. I'm totally guilty of this, just yesterday I needed to scale and crop an image and I had to download the whole Creative Cloud installer to my new laptop and install Photoshop. I'm positive I could have done this in a number of different tools even built into the OS, but for whatever reason I'm just hooked on Photoshop.
  - granshaw 5y ago
    FYI If you’re on a Mac you can do that right in Preview

zepto 5y ago

Omni in particular started off very strong on iOS but failed to adapt their products. Their failure to support the system file sharing / iCloud for so long was a killer for me. They were simply technically wrong about how to do it. There are many other ways in which they simply failed to adapt as the model changed, which I find perplexing.

Cyberdog 5y ago

There's a tool I use called Dash for quickly looking up documentation of coding languages and frameworks and it works offline. It does not have a subscription model, but it does have very frequent paid upgrades; without charting them out, I'd guess they are roughly yearly. I grumble every time because the upgrade cost isn't cheap and the updates rarely have groundbreaking new features, but then I consider how much use I get out of that tool and hand my dollars over. But the times when money has been tight or I've just been lazy and haven't upgraded when a new release comes out, the old one continues to work just fine. I'd much rather see Panic and other developers use a model like this; trick/incentivize me into re-buying your product every year without calling it a subscription or breaking my old versions. I used Coda pretty much since its launch and paid for upgrades to Coda 2 and Nova. I've built my career around these editors, so it's kind of scandalous how little I've paid Panic in proportion to how much money I've made using them. I would be fine with them having more frequent paid upgrades. But the day they try to rope me into a forced subscription model is the day I start looking at alternatives (which is too bad, because the last time I looked at the market when Coda 2 was getting a bit too long in the tooth and it was looking like Nova was never going to actually be released, it was clear that there are no serious alternatives for Mac-native code editors out there except for maybe the crusty old BBEdit, which I do not have fond memories of).

Hammershaft 5y ago
The problem here is that Apple does not support that license upgrade model for iOS.

ashneo76 5y ago

Sorry. Subscription isn't for me. I don't want to be in a jail of non ownership as an illusion. Please stop calling this as modern model. This is modern daylight theft

vr46 5y ago

I agree completely. Panic have, to be blunt, screwed me over about four times with various pieces of software over the last decade on both iOS and Mac, and Omni are not exactly much better. As cool and shiny as a lot of their software looks, I cannot trust them enough to buy the thing when I know that they will abandon support at the drop of a hat.

panicsocks 5y ago

> panic is abandoning yet another of their iOS apps Exactly. I don’t understand why anyone would buy their apps. For the money you’ll get an app riddled with bugs, zero useful updates that actually fix those bugs, and near zero support from panic. It happens over and over and over again. I guess I thought the saying started with “fool me thrice” because it took that long for me to figure it out. :/