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The consensus among all the devs I've talked to is that this feature will magically appear the next time Apple does a significant update to one of it's bigger t

The consensus among all the devs I've talked to is that this feature will magically appear the next time Apple does a significant update to one of it's bigger ticket apps... Final Cut, Aperture, Logic, etc. I can't see any way they can get around this problem without adding paid updates. Until then 3rd party developers are high and dry.

twiceaday 15y ago
Shucks. They will just have to sell another version of the App (Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio) for full price.
- kennywinker 15y ago
  Did you miss the headline? _Mac_ App Store. Full price upgrades works for Angry Birds, but anything less episodic or standalone and you have problems. See Tweetie 2, for an example. This issue is going to be rampant in the Mac App Store very very soon. It's been out for what, a year now? Time for a round of big updates... now you have two copies of all your apps.
  - msbarnett 15y ago
    > See Tweetie 2, for an example What's the example, exactly? Genuinely curious. I upgraded to Tweetie 2 as soon as it came out. My impression was that it was very successful right up until Twitter bought Atebits.
    - kennywinker 15y ago
      It's hard to say how much of that was noise, and what effect it had on sales / success, but there was a lot of hype about the paid upgrade leaving people unhappy. Example headlines (Google "tweetie 2 paid update" for more): "Tweetie 2 Pricing Controversy: An Interview with Tweetie's Creator ..." "Tweetie 2: 'New App' – Will Spit On Existing 'Old App' Users | iSource" "Still won't pay for Tweetie 2 upgrade? Try these Twitter apps ..." "Tweetie pricing fuss highlights App Store flaw | Macworld"
      - msbarnett 15y ago
        Fair enough. I'm not sure a mechanism for having paid upgrades under the same name as the original app would have avoided any of those headlines, though.
        fpgeek 15y ago
        You don't? If people had complained about being charged a reasonable, discounted upgrade price for Tweetie 2, they'd have been laughed at. That has been a common model for software upgrades for as long as I remember (and quite probably longer than I have been alive).
        msbarnett 15y ago
        People always complain about being asked to pay to upgrade. If they don't get a discount, they complain about that. If they do get a discount, they complain that the upgrade "should have" been a free minor version bump instead. In my experience, at least, it's more or less just a pathological behaviour that you can't escape.
      - atebits 15y ago
        The publicity only seemed to help. Tweetie 2 hit #1 Top Grossing on the App Store 24 hours after launch.
  - mmuro 15y ago
    You may not be aware but these are available on the Mac App Store.
- wil_shipley 15y ago
  Angry Birds and other games are in a totally different category. If you buy “Angry Birds Space” it’s reasonable to assume (a) you’re done with the original, and (b) you’re going to get as many hours of enjoyment out of it as the original, so it’s fair to pay as much. This isn’t the case with productivity applications, necessarily – you can keep using Delicious Library 2 and it’ll keep working great, so we need a way to reward customers who say, “Yes, I’ll pay to have some extra functionality.”
TetOn 15y ago
Nothing in Apple's recent history suggests this is true. Think of the recent kerfuffle over Final Cut; they had no intention of continuing to sell the older version even though the new one was feature incomplete. It is highly likely that, when it appears, Aperture4 will similarly just replace Aperture3 at approximately the same price point. You can choose to buy the new one or not, but there's no discounted upgrade path. Based on Shipley's numbers, it would seem that developers wanting to make money long-term on the Mac App Store would be wise to get on the same "lower initial price, but all major upgrades are full price" app model as soon as they can.
- kennywinker 15y ago
  We have yet to see this problem. The switch to FCPX was the first version in the app store. There hasn't been a high priced Apple app that has received a major upgrade via the Mac App Store. You may be right that they are going to stay at low initial / full price upgrade... I see two issues with that (for Apple). One, if the upgrade is not major enough to convince people to shell out for it. This fragments their apps ecosystem, and increases the support headache. Two, how do you carry people forward to the new version. If it's a separate purchase, that means it's a separate bundle, and won't show up as an update when you check for updates in the mac app store. Again causing confusion and fragmentation (you now have FCPX and FCPX.1 on your machine, which one opens that project file?). Again, I could be wrong, but Apple's current strategy look unsustainable to me.
  - tedunangst 15y ago
    When Aperture was added to the App Store, it cost the same as the standalone upgrade version, lots less than the full version. That could be a signal that upgrade prices are the new full prices, but we're trying to extract a lot of data from only a few tea leaves.
  - ghshephard 15y ago
    If the vast majority of your market is upgrading, and the customers for your new product, are by and large the same as the customers for your previous product, then you can simply offer the upgrade price to everyone, without loss of revenue. Indeed, you make it easier for new customers to come on board - so, best of both worlds. I'm not sure what's wrong with offering major new versions of your product at the upgrade price to everyone (new and existing users alike). Sounds perfectly sustainable.
seanalltogether 15y ago
Which honestly underscores one of my biggest complaints when working inside Apples ecosystem. I always get the feeling that they're building solutions for themselves first, and developers second, they don't take an agnostic approach to creating a platform. A good example of this is when you look at their UIKit and Appkit frameworks, all of the components were designed to the specific behavior that Apples engineers wanted at that time, with no thought on how to easily extend them. Compare this against other frameworks that were intentionally built to be easily skinnable and customizable.
- markkanof 15y ago
  That's a fair criticism, but the flip side of it is at least there is one real user of the frameworks they are building, which proves that in at least one situation the provided functionality is useful. Sometimes it seems like frameworks coming out of other big software companies provide what they imagine their customers will want, not what is actually useful when building real applications.
- duxup 15y ago
  Thus the downside of eat your own dog food.
  - deong 15y ago
    It's not a downside of using your own tools. It's a downside of the Apple way where you use your own tools without a fleeting thought to how anyone else might need to use them. Apple's development system appears to be optimized for the scenario that if you need some new method added, you can walk down the hall in your building at Apple and get someone to add it. But then they sell that API to paying customers who don't have that option.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  I can't think of a better endorsement of a platform than the creators investing real development dollars into using it. The alternative is Google, who doesn't release any top-tier paid apps on Android or Chrome Web Store. Or host anything important on Apps Engine.
bwooce 15y ago
It is already there, lurking, in iOS 5(back to 2, friends say) See http://t.co/EkqWISbS http://t.co/EkqWISbS for an example, appears as a bug when you try and upgrade an app you've deleted -- but it shows the capability does exist. I agree they won't enable it until they have a reason, the current situation is simple to manage from all angles.

twiceaday 15y ago

Shucks. They will just have to sell another version of the App (Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio) for full price.

kennywinker 15y ago
Did you miss the headline? _Mac_ App Store. Full price upgrades works for Angry Birds, but anything less episodic or standalone and you have problems. See Tweetie 2, for an example. This issue is going to be rampant in the Mac App Store very very soon. It's been out for what, a year now? Time for a round of big updates... now you have two copies of all your apps.
- msbarnett 15y ago
  > See Tweetie 2, for an example What's the example, exactly? Genuinely curious. I upgraded to Tweetie 2 as soon as it came out. My impression was that it was very successful right up until Twitter bought Atebits.
  - kennywinker 15y ago
    It's hard to say how much of that was noise, and what effect it had on sales / success, but there was a lot of hype about the paid upgrade leaving people unhappy. Example headlines (Google "tweetie 2 paid update" for more): "Tweetie 2 Pricing Controversy: An Interview with Tweetie's Creator ..." "Tweetie 2: 'New App' – Will Spit On Existing 'Old App' Users | iSource" "Still won't pay for Tweetie 2 upgrade? Try these Twitter apps ..." "Tweetie pricing fuss highlights App Store flaw | Macworld"
    - msbarnett 15y ago
      Fair enough. I'm not sure a mechanism for having paid upgrades under the same name as the original app would have avoided any of those headlines, though.
      - fpgeek 15y ago
        You don't? If people had complained about being charged a reasonable, discounted upgrade price for Tweetie 2, they'd have been laughed at. That has been a common model for software upgrades for as long as I remember (and quite probably longer than I have been alive).
        msbarnett 15y ago
        People always complain about being asked to pay to upgrade. If they don't get a discount, they complain about that. If they do get a discount, they complain that the upgrade "should have" been a free minor version bump instead. In my experience, at least, it's more or less just a pathological behaviour that you can't escape.
    - atebits 15y ago
      The publicity only seemed to help. Tweetie 2 hit #1 Top Grossing on the App Store 24 hours after launch.
- mmuro 15y ago
  You may not be aware but these are available on the Mac App Store.
wil_shipley 15y ago
Angry Birds and other games are in a totally different category. If you buy “Angry Birds Space” it’s reasonable to assume (a) you’re done with the original, and (b) you’re going to get as many hours of enjoyment out of it as the original, so it’s fair to pay as much. This isn’t the case with productivity applications, necessarily – you can keep using Delicious Library 2 and it’ll keep working great, so we need a way to reward customers who say, “Yes, I’ll pay to have some extra functionality.”

TetOn 15y ago

Nothing in Apple's recent history suggests this is true. Think of the recent kerfuffle over Final Cut; they had no intention of continuing to sell the older version even though the new one was feature incomplete. It is highly likely that, when it appears, Aperture4 will similarly just replace Aperture3 at approximately the same price point. You can choose to buy the new one or not, but there's no discounted upgrade path. Based on Shipley's numbers, it would seem that developers wanting to make money long-term on the Mac App Store would be wise to get on the same "lower initial price, but all major upgrades are full price" app model as soon as they can.

kennywinker 15y ago
We have yet to see this problem. The switch to FCPX was the first version in the app store. There hasn't been a high priced Apple app that has received a major upgrade via the Mac App Store. You may be right that they are going to stay at low initial / full price upgrade... I see two issues with that (for Apple). One, if the upgrade is not major enough to convince people to shell out for it. This fragments their apps ecosystem, and increases the support headache. Two, how do you carry people forward to the new version. If it's a separate purchase, that means it's a separate bundle, and won't show up as an update when you check for updates in the mac app store. Again causing confusion and fragmentation (you now have FCPX and FCPX.1 on your machine, which one opens that project file?). Again, I could be wrong, but Apple's current strategy look unsustainable to me.
- tedunangst 15y ago
  When Aperture was added to the App Store, it cost the same as the standalone upgrade version, lots less than the full version. That could be a signal that upgrade prices are the new full prices, but we're trying to extract a lot of data from only a few tea leaves.
- ghshephard 15y ago
  If the vast majority of your market is upgrading, and the customers for your new product, are by and large the same as the customers for your previous product, then you can simply offer the upgrade price to everyone, without loss of revenue. Indeed, you make it easier for new customers to come on board - so, best of both worlds. I'm not sure what's wrong with offering major new versions of your product at the upgrade price to everyone (new and existing users alike). Sounds perfectly sustainable.

seanalltogether 15y ago

Which honestly underscores one of my biggest complaints when working inside Apples ecosystem. I always get the feeling that they're building solutions for themselves first, and developers second, they don't take an agnostic approach to creating a platform. A good example of this is when you look at their UIKit and Appkit frameworks, all of the components were designed to the specific behavior that Apples engineers wanted at that time, with no thought on how to easily extend them. Compare this against other frameworks that were intentionally built to be easily skinnable and customizable.

markkanof 15y ago
That's a fair criticism, but the flip side of it is at least there is one real user of the frameworks they are building, which proves that in at least one situation the provided functionality is useful. Sometimes it seems like frameworks coming out of other big software companies provide what they imagine their customers will want, not what is actually useful when building real applications.
duxup 15y ago
Thus the downside of eat your own dog food.
- deong 15y ago
  It's not a downside of using your own tools. It's a downside of the Apple way where you use your own tools without a fleeting thought to how anyone else might need to use them. Apple's development system appears to be optimized for the scenario that if you need some new method added, you can walk down the hall in your building at Apple and get someone to add it. But then they sell that API to paying customers who don't have that option.
MatthewPhillips 15y ago
I can't think of a better endorsement of a platform than the creators investing real development dollars into using it. The alternative is Google, who doesn't release any top-tier paid apps on Android or Chrome Web Store. Or host anything important on Apps Engine.

bwooce 15y ago

It is already there, lurking, in iOS 5(back to 2, friends say) See http://t.co/EkqWISbS http://t.co/EkqWISbS for an example, appears as a bug when you try and upgrade an app you've deleted -- but it shows the capability does exist. I agree they won't enable it until they have a reason, the current situation is simple to manage from all angles.