It is sad that Apple only took action now, after years of requests and complains by indie developers. Now that app boom is over, I doubt this App Store changes will have any impact.
The reason I quit Adobe and bought Sketch was to support software that I could actually buy. Not this "Good deal for professionals, even cheaper for students, fuck anybody who just wants to use a decent art program every couple of months" model.
I'll see what I can track down on details, but I'm preemptively very disappointed about this.
EDIT: Sketch is _NOT_ switching to a subscription model. Sketch is breaking from the "paid major, free minor" upgrade schedule, and going to "rolling releases, $99 buys the app and a year of upgrades."
Personally I think that's a fair system. It frees them from having to plan new features around the major/minor release schedule, but you can still buy the software and just keep using it.
My biggest concern is going to be OS compatibility. With OS X on a yearly upgrade treadmill, if there are any compatibility issues (and there almost always are), then the Sketch upgrade is effectively not optional. That's not so different from how it is now, except there have only been two major upgrades since the original release (September 2010), so you'll be buying OS compatibility fixes more than twice as often. So I still don't love it.
https://blog.sketchapp.com/versioning-licensing-and-sketch-4...
It looks quite a bit like a subscription model to the average person. $99/year is a pretty big jump in price, but I guess they've gotten a chunk of pro market people. The whole bit about being unfair to late adopters is a bit of bunk.
Not really? My problem with subscription software is that you lose access to it if you stop paying. I used Photoshop 7 for a looooong time because we didn't need any of the new features. You can't do that with Photoshop CC. Because it's a subscription.
If anything, maybe you could call it an "update subscription," but if the software works without an active subscription, then it's not a subscription. That would be like Comcast saying "If you cancel your cable subscription, you can still turn on your TV and watch reruns of whatever aired when you were a customer."
> $99/year is a pretty big jump in price
For that much money, you could use Adobe Illustrator every January, May, and September!
> For that much money, you could use Adobe Illustrator every January, May, and September!
Illustrator is $19.99 per month paid monthly, so a little easier to handle but 2.4x more expensive. Illustrator has a lot more support but the difference in price just got reduced ($99 for about 2+ years versus per year).
Its about a 2x jump in price for Sketch.
I'm most saddened that neither company cares about customer loyalty in a money way.
Autodesk Sketchbook did this around version 6 (not sure if they still do it), and it's a horrible experience.
They change major versions and charge you again. You only find out when the older version you paid for is no longer available on your updated OS X.
Awesome software that I stopped using because of this.
The easy money's already been made in the App Store; with a million+ apps it's a visibility issue. No amount of changes to the App Store will remove the problem of there being a dozen apps that already solve the problem that your app solves.
That said, a subscription model with a reduced cut could improve monetization prospects for a lot of developers, indie especially.
Only if users except the model. I for one, will be removing any of my apps that move to a subscription model. I have no interest in renting the software on my phone.
If Apple adds subscriptions to the Mac App Store that is. We're still waiting for "App Analytics" on the Mac. (The stats where you can see how many people viewed your app's page in the app store and how many downloaded the app. Even though it's the same backend those stats are only available for the iOS store).