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Comment by isomorphic | Hacker News Reader

The US$19.99 price is a bit steep to buy sight-unseen. That's more of an App Store problem than Blink's fault. Obviously the price is fine if it works better than Prompt.

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It appears to be open source. https://github.com/blinksh/blink

That is correct. You can compile it and install it yourself, or participate in our continuous testing.

Oh wow, thank you very much for simplifying the build process. I tried a few months back and it was... painful.

Thanks for giving it a try again! It is complex with all the dependencies, but doing precompiled libs helped a ton to alleviate the situation.

I'm not so sure I'd say that's an App Store problem. There are ways around requiring purchases sight-unseen. Unless I'm mistaken, you can have a 'lite' version as a separate app, or you can have in-app purchases to unlock the full version.

(Don't get me wrong, though... I think the price point is fine.)

It does and it's open source. You can ask for improvements, know why something is the way it is, and change it yourself if you need to.

I bought it. I use it on my iPhone and iPad Pro and it's been great.

Personally I love it and feel it's absolutely worth the price

I used to like and recommend Prompt until I found out that they came out with a new version and offered no upgrade path -- it was a separate app on the store. They never bothered to update the old version with post-iPhone-4S graphics, so all the buttons are huge and it's low-res. I didn't buy the new version.

They can't really offer an upgrade path though; as I understand it the closest they can do is switch to subscription pricing.

In-app purchase?

I'm not an iOS developer myself but I don't think you can switch on screen-size support and high-red graphics as an in-app purchase (unless you have every screen defined twice)

I meant in-app purchase of an 'unlock token', download free new version, verify & obtain new auth token, remove old version.

Convoluted, but better than nothing I'd have thought.

Pretty sure it was a re-write, not really possible to have 2 side-by-side versions unlocked through IAP.

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