Overall, nice. But it immediately hits a pet peeve of mine: requiring an in-app purchase to enable native features built into my device’s OS.
In this case, $6 US for dark mode.
In this case, $6 US for dark mode.
Id rather just have a “donate $6 to help dev” in app purchase as it seems more authentic.
However, maybe there are really people who think dark mode is worth $6. Kids raised on Roblox seem to have no ethical issue with paying $5 for a digital hat that is just flipping a bit.
If a wizard could magically duplicate chairs, I’d have the same argument. Why charge $5 for something that costs $0 to replicate.
The design of the hat and the system to run it costs something. The design of the chair and the workshop to build it costs something. Those are fixed costs. It’s the marginal cost that is very different.
I’m not even against charging people for digital hats (I paid $5 after all), I’d just rather companies be more straightforward. Id rather pay $60 for a game once and not be microtransactioned.
Id rather pay $6 (or not since I don’t like this app) once than pay to enable features that clearly cost nothing or very little to implement.
App makers can charge whatever they like. And potential customers can complain about how much it sucks trying to convince app makers to build in a way I think is better for society (ie, straightforward prices for things rather than income streams from payments). But I could be wrong.
I played many a game that cost $20 and had thousands of hats so there’s many successful business plans that don’t involve free to play and then charging $5 for flipping a bit to enable my character to have a hat.
No other profession probably degrades themselves as much as developers. If his app is worth it, people would pay or else they don't.
No developer need to beg for money if they are good at their craft.
And people will pay $60 for physical items but balk at $0.99 apps and digital goods, it's strange.
I like the shareware model where people pay what they can, or what they perceive the value to be. I don’t think this is begging.
Programming is kind of unique because the marginal cost of production is near zero. I think this is a feature, not a bug and why it’s possible to have single person dev companies that are quite lucrative.
And of course there’s lots of open source developers who are excellent and donate their time with only expecting $0.
The bit is flipped at runtime or compile time. In the old days you'd pay for an upgrade and get a new binary with the feature compiled in. Nowadays the feature is compiled in and gated at runtime. In the end it's the same.
That’s better than every other pay scheme I can think of since you have the option to do without.
It’s clear you put some thought into pricing and have avoided the subscription route which is what most people will complain about.
I wouldn’t put much stock into the complaints here.
If the author really wishes to put this feature behind a purchase, "follow system settings" should be the free default.