The alternative is apps being sold to shady outfits that inject spyware. For example Cheetah Mobile bought QuickPic and when Chinafire sold SuperSU to a American-based shell company.
If app stores allowed paid version upgrades this trend might not have happened.
This is a takeaway that I think is really important that a lot of people miss. The problem with the "new" model is that it's created a double-whammy of much lower prices in absolute dollars than we were paying ~15 years ago for software and an expectation that once you've paid that low price, you should get upgrades for free forever. The plateau you mention is, of course, why that can't actually work: most apps don't grow their userbase at a steady rate, they get bursts of new users when new versions come out -- and usually fewer and fewer new users for each new version. If every customer represents one and only one point of revenue -- and that point is a third or a fourth what you'd have charged for the same amount of engineering work under the old model -- this is a death spiral.
Under the "old" model, PocketCasts could easily have been a $20–25 program with $12–15 upgrades when new versions came out every couple of years and it wouldn't have seemed unfairly priced at all. Under our glorious new model, the only way to match this is with subscriptions. And people hate subscriptions. Nobody works out the math to see whether the subscription model actually costs them less than the old upgrade model, they just have a visceral reaction to it.
I get the frustration with any company that charges that low one-time fee, implicitly (or even explicitly, as PocketCasts apparently did!) promises free lifetime upgrades, then goes back on that promise some years later when it proves unsustainable. At the same time, is going out of business or shutting down that product really preferable?
This is of course from the users standpoint.
I'm not sure how to really address that in a subscription-based world, although PocketCasts seems to be pursuing a pretty good approach here: you can use the app for its core functionality without subscribing at all, and the subscription price is pretty reasonable. If you want Office 365, where the cheapest price is $70/yr, the calculation might well lead you to "let's see if Apple Pages or LibreOffice can do what I want instead."
> We wanted to do the right thing by you though and since you've paid for the Web Player in the past, we're giving you 3 years worth of Pocket Casts Plus at no extra charge. You don't need to do anything to claim this, it's already been applied to your account. This means you can continue doing all the things you currently do, and take advantage of our brand new Plus features.
I think this is definitely the right way to handle prior paid customers. Unlike Airmail (oof) they’ve offered a subsidized service for the older users.
I prefer the subscription model myself. If you don't renew the subscription you get ads, or whatever happens now.
Updates fix security issues, and enable Android's API to move forward. Not having them because you didn't pay would create a large base of software obsolete UI's, buggy software with security issues which will create huge problems down the road. I'm not surprised Google doesn't like the idea.
The (less featureful) browser and desktop apps are subscription, but unless people want the new features they probably won't see huge revenue from those for 3 years when the subscriptions for people who already bought start expiring.
I'm not sure, but the desktop app is probably a wrapper for the web app - as someone who bought the Windows Phone version, their native app was barely MVP level.
Edit: also where is all this about ads coming from?
If the people who purchased this received the source code as Free Software, that would've also solved this issue, don't you think?
Pocketcast was bought by NPR, This American Life, and some other radio stations which makes this pivot more confusing. No more public radio donations from me anymore.