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Comment by kolob1980 | Hacker News Reader

kolob1980

The question is different. Are these reviews informative? Are they helpful to other people?

They are helpful to me: these reviews tell me when a free app might be hiding payments behind IAP (Android's store does not list every possible IAP + their cost and description, iOS does, so on Android almost every app just has a $0.99-$99.99 listing), they tell me when an app is trying to potentially steal data, contacts, or similar, they tell me that there might be a similar product that is cheaper or actually free in the same niche.

Got it. Although I do not understand how you can give an application 1 star simply for its price. I never do that.

I understand. I would not 1 star a paid app for $5 because I wanted it for $0.99, that's dumb (though think about how smart the average person is, and assume half of them are less than average, and they all have phones too).

Let's say a free app advertises "play online with friends and play by yourself" and is free to play, free to download. Then you finish wasting 2GB of your mobile data ($30+ in US) and create an account (monetized, spammed) and now you find out that a mandatory payment IAP is required to play multiplayer. That deserves 1 star and probably a report.

Unrelated: You also have the shitty-behaviour apps that are either legitimately good or bad, but pop up "RATE US 5 STARS" every other launch. I would like those permanently banned from the store forever.

Mobile data prices dropped significantly in the USA, Visible, MetroPCS & Cricket (all of which are just fronts for the big 3 carriers) offer unlimited everything for aroind $25 a month per line.

The app I'm talking about costs 4.99 forever. And even in the free version, it is not very limited. In fact, this payment is like a donation.

Do you sell it as a free version and a paid version as two separate packages/apps, or do you activate an in app purchase?

From my experience dealing with the general public (I used to build some games that also exported to Android) the latter seemingly gets treated as a gross ripoff scam and the former is acceptable to people - it's a giant buy button with the price on it. We got better results when the "premium version!" upsell just opened the premium version in the app store. Worked great for one time purchases.

This seems like a common practice, for example the non-abusive third party reddit client (the first-party one is an abomination of spam, invasive tracking, spam push notifications, and incredibly terrible dark patterns) app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu.... vs https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....

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