It looks lovely, but charging a subscription for spell check, in-document search, and printing -- table stakes for a text editor -- is surely going to rub people the wrong way.[1]
It's buying into a promise that your monthly payments are going toward continuous improvement of the product – a promise that might be kept, or might not – and even if it is, for how long? If updates stall out after awhile, or if the new features don't solve anything for you, it's not like you can choose to skip an upgrade. And the more you use the product, the higher the barrier to switching away. I agree, Craft looks lovely, but there's no way I'm locking myself into its business model.
I say this every time, but this is a solved problem. Developers of software like Sketch and Bitwig Studio have the right kind of subscription model, where you subscribe to updates, not access. If you don't care for the latest version, you can let your subscription lapse and keep using the last version you're licensed for. Apple has all the pieces necessary to simply gate App Store updates via subscription, but they apparently have no motivation to do so.
I just do not subscribe to many things. I don't like assigning myself future financial tasks, and I don't like dealing with recurring payments[1].
As a result, I've stopped using a bunch of things that went sub-only. There are more I'll be dropping.
And this has moved a lot of things I did on my phone elsewhere. This, combined with the fact that the Iphone X (I have no need to upgrade it) is a bit too big, and the Screentime thing tells me I use it an average of 17 minutes a day, which is going to mainly be 2FA and texting with family.
I mean, I kinda welcome this - I don't like phone dependency. And I expect I'm not the median case. But Apple's strategy has backfired with me.
[1] I realize this is not strictly rational, and I have paid more for one-time-purchase software that I used once than a sub would have been. It doesn't matter.
Subscriptions cost future hassles and distraction, as well as the money. I'm busy. No subscription, no deal :D
Still could work but isn't easy, and probably throws a wrench in the whole modern idea of continuous develop -> deploy.
An Xcode deploy target can require a minimum OS version, and when an app's minimum version increases with an update, the update is not available to users who haven't updated their device. If the device doesn't support the new OS version, the user is stuck with the last version supported on the old OS, and will not receive any future patches.
To provide a counter example, I subscribe to Ulysses. They embody “subscription for access done right” (at least so far). I liked the app enough that I bought into that promise, and so far, the developer had delivered with excellent updates over time.
What I dislike is that there’s no guarantee this will be the case.
But to be fair, this is how reputations will be built: both good and bad. Developers who build a bad reputation will not succeed in the long run. It sucks that someone had to be the guinea pig though...
So while there’s risk in buying the promise, it can pay off.
I’d still prefer the “subscribe to updates” approach.
The problem is that this isn’t the only incentive, or rather, not a well-defined version of the incentive at play.
The incentive is to simply keep the customer as a customer, over time. Multiple strategies will work, which includes being nice to the customer, but also includes lock-in strategies like data availability (proprietary format, no export), logic availability (custom proprietary language, stdlib, etc), etc
That is, Jetbrains and Oracle both run on subscription models, with very different interpretations of how to process those incentives.
Also, we’re starting to reach the point where money is an ineffective incentive.
I'm not saying the paperless office is here, but with everyone WFH and no access to the office color laser printer, who is generating much paper any more?
You know what would be better? A feature to generate an epub or kindle document. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/epub-kindle-and-mult...