Hacker News Reader

> The issue(s) I need the most help with revolve around generating revenues that don't involve advertising, subscriptions, dark patterns or racing to the bottom on pricing. The AppStore model makes it very difficult to use some of the techniques that worked in the old days of shrink wrap and direct online distribution; trial periods, version upgrades and other concepts that don't fit into the AppStore buy it once and get upgraded for life.

The part that bugs me is that Apple could fix these issues but is choosing not to. Rather than adding upgrade pricing (something developers have been asking for since 2009), they added and have been pushing for subscriptions :(

I’m not as down on subscriptions for apps as other people seem to be. If—and I recognize these are big “ifs” here—the annual price is reasonable (which I’d roughly define as “no more than what you’d be paying for upgrades if they were amortized over a yearly basis”), and developers use this stable recurring revenue to make frequent updates to their apps on a rolling release rather than holding big features back for major updates every one to three years, I’m happy enough to pay for them this way.

Granted, I’d prefer to see the ability to handle subscriptions the way Panic does for their editor Nova, in which you get all the updates as long as your subscription is valid, and if you stop paying you stay on whatever the most recent version was when your subscription expires. (This is distinct from Jetbrains’ take on this, where when you stop paying you stay on the version that was current when your subscription started.) This is something I don’t think the App Store supports, either.

> I am a former Apple employee but this has given me no special privileges or advantages at all. Perhaps it has given me some particular skill at diving into header files to figure out a solution to a technical problem.

It’s definitely the latter. Being a former employee or a longtime developer on Apple platforms gives you a ton of background knowledge. Apple’s frameworks generally have a lot of consistency with each other (probably because of how they do review of new APIs internally), so once you know several frameworks you can easily pick up another. People without that background struggle, even if they’re experienced developers on other platforms.

I experience this myself in the other direction when I try to write stuff for Windows. I’m also ex-Apple so I know the tools and I know where to look to find out what I don’t yet know on the Mac, and worst case scenario I can dig in and reverse engineer Apple stuff that does what I want to do pretty easily. On Windows, I’m just a lot slower and I have to do a lot more hunting around to find out what I need. Generally when I do a new feature that needs platform specific code on both Windows and Mac, I do the Mac side first so I can validate the idea and get something working, and then I do the Windows side second so I’m not having to do exploratory work there, it’s just a matter of trying to find the equivalent functionality and hooking it up. I hear from a lot of Windows folks that they struggle to code on the Mac and they blame Apple for this, but really it’s more just the fact that they have a ton more background knowledge on Windows and they discount the value of this.

Thanks for that observation. You are totally right. Having learned to dive into framework headers and map idioms from one to another is totally something I learned at Apple, especially in the early days of creating a lot of the frameworks that form the foundation of the OS. I have always found Apple's docs to be frustrating, but when I look at them without the benefit of my background, I can see how it must be maddening to developers coming to the platform.

The Halide people wrote a post on how they handled this for releasing Halide II while not leaving long-term supporters behind.

https://lux.camera/pro-camera-action-introducing-halide-mark...

Basically: it's a subscription, but you get to keep the last features you got on it if you cancel. Owners of the original Halide got a year of free updates.

HN thread on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24860043