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The problem with mobile apps is that I often don't have a clear idea of the value I will receive. I've bought apps in the past that I have literally never used.
by jiggy2011 13y ago
The problem with mobile apps is that I often don't have a clear idea of the value I will receive. I've bought apps in the past that I have literally never used.
At $1 this doesn't really matter because I will also occasionally buy a $1 app which gives me way more than $1 in value. So really I may have paid $10 for that useful app, but the problem is that the person who wrote that useful app only gets 1/10 of the money. The other 9/10 is distributed among those who developed the useless (to me) apps.
The answer as you suggest is to demonstrate the value before purchase. I think the problem here is that the app store model is often not conductive to that, you often just get a couple of bad screenshots and 1 paragraph of text.
On the other hand I will usually do more research when buying desktop software, simply because doing research on a desktop computer is less painful (I have a big screen and a proper keyboard).
- StavrosK 13y agoWhat about the trial? You can try it out for 15 minutes, at least on Android.
- jiggy2011 13y ago15 minutes isn't really long enough. Especially since you often need that long just to download an update. 15 minutes might be ok for a $1 app, but it should scale with price. If I'm going to pay $100 I probably want a month trial.
- StavrosK 13y agoI agree that 15 minutes isn't very long, but you also aren't paying $100 for an Android app, so it's probably long enough.
- jiggy2011 13y agoI might pay $100 for an app though , if I had confidence that it was worth the $100. I think that google probably prefers that there be thousands of cheap apps rather than a small number of good ones.
- 6d0debc071 13y agoIf something's worth $100 it should be clear fairly quickly that it's an awesome thing. The more time it's taking me to decide the less evidence there is of awesomeness compared to others that do the same sorts of things. Though I don't think 15 minutes is enough time to convince me that anything's worth buying. Even shareware gave you more to go on.
- jfoster 13y agoStrangely, it used to be 24 hours on Android. I think one of the worst decisions that Google made with relation to Android was to reduce it to just 15 minutes. I think it was in response to people completing games within 24 hours. Seems a huge overreaction, though.
- bostonpete 13y agoSeems like the trial period should be dictated by the developer.
- jiggy2011 13y agoGames should really be trialed differently. Like only include a small number of the levels/characters but allow for unlimited (or much longer) time.
- sorbits 13y agoSpot on! I am surprised this isn’t mentioned more often, but there likely is a strong correlation between the price and lack of trials.
- snuxoll 13y agoThis is one area where I wish iOS and Android would copy from Windows Phone, apps can have a 'trial mode' (which often is used to just have a free, ad-supported version) that you can download without payment, it can be time-limited, launch-limited, a feature-limited (depending on how you choose to implement it, there's just a IsTrial() method to call and you can handle it however). If you buy the app it just starts returning false to calls to IsTrial() and the functionality gets enabled. Of course, there are plenty of apps that have 'free' or 'lite' versions in the Android or iOS marketplace, but they suffer from a critical flaw: data doesn't transfer between the 'free' app to the 'pro' or paid one because of sandboxing unless they implement some kind of cloud sync.