That's so cheap though, you'd have to sell hundreds of thousands of copies per year to even support a few developers, in the USA anyway. The app store model is

That's so cheap though, you'd have to sell hundreds of thousands of copies per year to even support a few developers, in the USA anyway. The app store model is driving companies towards subscriptions and micro-transactions, because otherwise like you say users pay a low price once, and get new development and support forever for free. IMO it would be better to raise prices and charge for new versions of apps every year or so, like we used to do, but the app store and user expectations make that unfeasible.