I second, third, and fourth the notion about pathological customers. iOS is practically training a generation of them. I'm glad they are far away from me.
I happily pay for quality apps. Why? It's going to cost me anywhere from $1 to $10, and that is honestly chump change for an app that will provide much more in value.
For some reason, if you give away your work for free, all of the cheapskates and losers come out and start insulting the service and/or claiming they didn't get enough support.
What do people expect when they don't pay for a valuable app...?
This is exactly what Spotify experienced when they announced they were going from free -> not so free.
http://www.spotify.com/uk/blog/archives/2011/04/14/upcoming-...
But otherwise I do agree with all you wrote!
If there's a free vs. paid app that I want I will always go for the paid app. I never tried Instapaper free.
Yes, jailbreaking makes piracy possible, but Cydia has multiple warnings about adding the repositories required for piracy. In fact, our best statistics show less than half of all the jailbroken devices have pirated an app.
I agree with your points, but I don't want people to misunderstand the point of jailbreaking: jailbreaking is about controlling your own device and doing things the App Store doesn't even conceptually allow.
Can you give me some tips on how to discern quality and safety in Cydia packages, or are these things simply endemic to the jailbroken app ecosystem?
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/10/04/iphone-apps-transmit-...
But honestly, I'm more concerned with quality than trust. I think that malicious apps are probably very rare on Cydia; I'm more concerned with background processes that eat battery life, changes to the underlying OS which make the phone unreliable, buggy code with unintended side effects, etc. I don't think this is the norm, but I have very little information with which to separate the gems from the junk.
On a computer, installing apps with no restrictions is the norm, and so there are countless forms of social proof to discover which apps are safe and reliable. I'm looking for something equivalent for Cydia packages, as well as detailed manifests of what is installed and running with each install. (Perhaps I should just stick to paid packages, where the author has higher incentive to maintain quality.)
But you try telling that to someone who isn't so technically inclined. To the average joe, jailbreaking probably equates to pirating, just because it enables you to do so. Just like "torrenting" isn't the same thing as "pirating," one will often find that the mainstream association of torrenting is that of piracy.
However, it makes me feel slightly better than the majority who are jailbreaking their phones aren't sailing the seven seas and looting and pillaging all of the apps that they can find.
Cydia is awesome. Piracy is not why.
Though, I have to admit, I sometimes enjoy enraging pathological customers. On the phone, I have told them they are fired, and not welcome to come back to my website ever again. I sometimes pretend to be a nearly deaf old man when dealing with their complaints. It makes my day when a pathological customer calls now. Unfortunately, I only get a call from a pathological customers every other month or so.
That's possible, but they will be a factor in your business if they are unfairly slamming you in reviews.
ReadItLater's free version is rated 1 star less than the pro version. All of the 1 star reviewers appear to be worth ignoring.
I'd install something like appirater to try to drown out the morons, and boost ratings. https://github.com/arashpayan/appirater/