I did not receive a lot of interaction in the comments on my article at Mac Appstorm, but I did receive one that I want to interact with.
As an early supporter of apps like Bohemian Coding’s Sketch and Pixelmator, I think I deserve the free upgrades. Just because Adobe charges you for one more useful feature doesn’t mean that’s the way to go. MacRabbit Espresso is sold outside the MAS and version 2 was released as a free upgrade.
I’m sure Natalia is a fine person. I see she works with ExpressionEngine and I love my fellow EE users. I don’t really mean to pick on her, this is just an excuse to talk about this app entitlement mentality. And she’s only one person, where I’ve heard this sentiment from lots of folks. Developers should give me free updates forever and ever (and the choir and the people said, “amen”.)
I don’t think anyone of this mindset usually considers how on earth that developer is going to make ends meet. How is a developer supposed to keep the lights on and feed his family? If all a developer does is continue to work on his application and provide updates and fixes for it, where is his/her/their income coming from?
This is a tricky proposition because I think it’s a good idea, and good business to provide free updates, bug fixes, security patches and the like. Yet I think that developers should be able to charge for major upgrades. My point in the article was that Apple has not provided a way to do this in the Mac or iOS App Store. Some developers have found ways to work around this, but the solutions aren’t great.
But let me interact a little with Natalia’s comments. She uses Sketch and Pixelmater and she thinks she “deserves free upgrades.” I wonder how she would feel as a web designer if she was required to continue to work on a website, to update it and design new parts of it, for free, after she had delivered it to the client. I doubt that would work out well for her. I’m not talking about her being paid weekly, or monthly, or yearly or something to continue that work. I’m talking about her being expected to do it for free. Forever. How is she supposed to make money? App developers are in the same position. They need revenue in order to continue the work and development.
As far as MacRabbit not charging for Espresso 2, I applaud them. I’m glad they can afford to do that. I used Espresso before I switched to Coda. It’s a good app. But a developer shouldn’t be expected to do what they did. They need to be able to make a living. They are quite within their rights to make money of their development.
I think we need to loose the entitlement mentality as users of great apps.