5 ms·

What's missing is you pay for Adobe Photoshop CS2 and it's yours forever. Then when CS3 comes out you can upgrade with a nice discount.

by raybb 2y ago

derefr 2y ago
Ah, alright. There's nothing actually stopping you from doing this — it requires two things: 1. either a third-party licensing server (and thus some SSO auth system — but just require Apple's own SSO for it and it'll still be a clean-ish workflow) to share/sync the transaction status from one app to the other; or a local Group Container plus logic in each app to write the transaction statuses fetched for the given app into the group container for the other app to read 2. never charging for the app as a whole, but instead breaking your app's pricing down into a set of IAP-purchased feature entitlements (whether charged for individually, or as a bundle, the important part is that each entitlement has its own price.) Then, making the new version just a superset of the features of the old version — and so, when you're buying the old version, you're buying features A+B+C; and then when you're buying the new version (with the app being able to see whether or not you've bought the old version), new customers are buying A+B+C+D+E, while existing customers are buying D+E. --- Note that there's an even easier way to do this (and I think this is the way Apple would prefer you do this): don't release V2 as a separate app from V1. Instead, have V1 auto-update to a v2.0.0 release — which converts the V1 app into a launcher with an "edition" (major version) selector. Either compile in both the V1 and V2 codebase into this app, or better yet (for download/on-disk size), package separate V1 and V2 "engines" as executable DLC packages, submitted to Apple for review along with the app, downloaded on-demand when the app needs to run them. With this approach, the app would either start up the first time still within V1, and allow/offer people the option of "seamlessly upgrading" the app to V2; or the app would start up with an "edition launcher" UI that allows people a choice. (And either way, you could offer the ability at any time to freely switch between V2 and V1, re-launching the app with the other engine enabled. Like dual-booting Operating Systems, but at the app level.) Here, you could charge for the V2 "upgrade" ahead-of-time, before allowing the user to switch over to the V2 engine; or you could allow the user to switch between V1-fully-licensed and V2-demo modes (or even between V1-demo and V2-demo modes), where purchasing for each edition is separately available within that edition's UX. The expectation here is that all the user's existing feature entitlements would keep working as long as they continue to use the V1 engine — as you said, the V1 engine was a one-time purchase, and so even with this edition-launcher abstraction introduced in v2.0.0 of the app, V1 itself should still keep working for them forever. The benefit of doing this multi-editioned-shared-app approach, together with IAP feature entitlements, is that V2 can inherit some of the V1 entitlements, and then simply charge for the V2-novel entitlements. So V2 gets discounted for V1 purchasers inherently, by the fact that by buying V1, they've already bought half of the components of the V2 purchase-bundle.
- jayd16 2y ago
  Have you actually done this? Is there a common example on the app store? When did it become possible to download additional executable bundles on iOS?
  - derefr 2y ago
    Re: feature entitlements shared through a shared SSO auth backend and/or Group Container — yes, apps do this. Mostly this is in app "suites" where you can IAP a feature entitlement in one app in the suite, and the entitlement should then become available to the other apps in the suite. (I think the Omni Group apps do it? Correct me if I'm wrong.) Re: multi-edition shared apps — I'm not sure if this has been done with the App Store in particular, but it's just a combination of things App Store apps can do (basically, moving code out into dylibs, and then marking those dylibs as On-Demand Resources.) I know that this is a common approach to supporting netplay (and especially replay of historical netplay) in competitive-eSport multiplayer game titles on Steam et al, where players need to be on the same exact version of the game engine + netcode to sync (and so those engine libs are downloaded on-demand before the match begins); and where you need an exact ABI version of the game engine to replay a netplay recording (and so that engine lib is downloaded on-demand when you go to replay the recording.) ETA: looking more into this, I'm finding conflicting reports on whether executable-code On-Demand Resources are currently allowed on the iOS App Store: it looks like the Apple docs say no, and yet some apps (from not-bigcorp devs!) are doing it anyway and getting away with it (and have for many review cycles.) Very confusing. Maybe those devs are part of an alpha-test rollout for executable-ODR?
- CodeWriter23 2y ago
  So whereas authors used to ship a new version, and let people upgrade to that version at a discount, the author now assumes the burden with each new release of maintaining and testing V1 (that’s with all the feature flags turned off) as well as every feature flag between V1 and Vcurrent turned on. One at a time. Sounds like insanity to me.
  - nomel 2y ago

What's missing is you pay for Adobe Photoshop CS2 and it's yours forever. Then when CS3 comes out you can upgrade with a nice discount.

by raybb 2y ago

What's missing is you pay for Adobe Photoshop CS2 and it's yours forever. Then when CS3 comes out you can upgrade with a nice discount.

derefr 2y ago

Ah, alright. There's nothing actually stopping you from doing this — it requires two things: 1. either a third-party licensing server (and thus some SSO auth system — but just require Apple's own SSO for it and it'll still be a clean-ish workflow) to share/sync the transaction status from one app to the other; or a local Group Container plus logic in each app to write the transaction statuses fetched for the given app into the group container for the other app to read 2. never charging for the app as a whole, but instead breaking your app's pricing down into a set of IAP-purchased feature entitlements (whether charged for individually, or as a bundle, the important part is that each entitlement has its own price.) Then, making the new version just a superset of the features of the old version — and so, when you're buying the old version, you're buying features A+B+C; and then when you're buying the new version (with the app being able to see whether or not you've bought the old version), new customers are buying A+B+C+D+E, while existing customers are buying D+E. --- Note that there's an even easier way to do this (and I think this is the way Apple would prefer you do this): don't release V2 as a separate app from V1. Instead, have V1 auto-update to a v2.0.0 release — which converts the V1 app into a launcher with an "edition" (major version) selector. Either compile in both the V1 and V2 codebase into this app, or better yet (for download/on-disk size), package separate V1 and V2 "engines" as executable DLC packages, submitted to Apple for review along with the app, downloaded on-demand when the app needs to run them. With this approach, the app would either start up the first time still within V1, and allow/offer people the option of "seamlessly upgrading" the app to V2; or the app would start up with an "edition launcher" UI that allows people a choice. (And either way, you could offer the ability at any time to freely switch between V2 and V1, re-launching the app with the other engine enabled. Like dual-booting Operating Systems, but at the app level.) Here, you could charge for the V2 "upgrade" ahead-of-time, before allowing the user to switch over to the V2 engine; or you could allow the user to switch between V1-fully-licensed and V2-demo modes (or even between V1-demo and V2-demo modes), where purchasing for each edition is separately available within that edition's UX. The expectation here is that all the user's existing feature entitlements would keep working as long as they continue to use the V1 engine — as you said, the V1 engine was a one-time purchase, and so even with this edition-launcher abstraction introduced in v2.0.0 of the app, V1 itself should still keep working for them forever. The benefit of doing this multi-editioned-shared-app approach, together with IAP feature entitlements, is that V2 can inherit some of the V1 entitlements, and then simply charge for the V2-novel entitlements. So V2 gets discounted for V1 purchasers inherently, by the fact that by buying V1, they've already bought half of the components of the V2 purchase-bundle.

jayd16 2y ago
Have you actually done this? Is there a common example on the app store? When did it become possible to download additional executable bundles on iOS?
- derefr 2y ago
  Re: feature entitlements shared through a shared SSO auth backend and/or Group Container — yes, apps do this. Mostly this is in app "suites" where you can IAP a feature entitlement in one app in the suite, and the entitlement should then become available to the other apps in the suite. (I think the Omni Group apps do it? Correct me if I'm wrong.) Re: multi-edition shared apps — I'm not sure if this has been done with the App Store in particular, but it's just a combination of things App Store apps can do (basically, moving code out into dylibs, and then marking those dylibs as On-Demand Resources.) I know that this is a common approach to supporting netplay (and especially replay of historical netplay) in competitive-eSport multiplayer game titles on Steam et al, where players need to be on the same exact version of the game engine + netcode to sync (and so those engine libs are downloaded on-demand before the match begins); and where you need an exact ABI version of the game engine to replay a netplay recording (and so that engine lib is downloaded on-demand when you go to replay the recording.) ETA: looking more into this, I'm finding conflicting reports on whether executable-code On-Demand Resources are currently allowed on the iOS App Store: it looks like the Apple docs say no, and yet some apps (from not-bigcorp devs!) are doing it anyway and getting away with it (and have for many review cycles.) Very confusing. Maybe those devs are part of an alpha-test rollout for executable-ODR?
CodeWriter23 2y ago
So whereas authors used to ship a new version, and let people upgrade to that version at a discount, the author now assumes the burden with each new release of maintaining and testing V1 (that’s with all the feature flags turned off) as well as every feature flag between V1 and Vcurrent turned on. One at a time. Sounds like insanity to me.
- nomel 2y ago