I can't see any way they can get around this problem without adding paid updates.
Until then 3rd party developers are high and dry.
Based on Shipley's numbers, it would seem that developers wanting to make money long-term on the Mac App Store would be wise to get on the same "lower initial price, but all major upgrades are full price" app model as soon as they can.
You may be right that they are going to stay at low initial / full price upgrade... I see two issues with that (for Apple).
One, if the upgrade is not major enough to convince people to shell out for it. This fragments their apps ecosystem, and increases the support headache.
Two, how do you carry people forward to the new version. If it's a separate purchase, that means it's a separate bundle, and won't show up as an update when you check for updates in the mac app store. Again causing confusion and fragmentation (you now have FCPX and FCPX.1 on your machine, which one opens that project file?).
Again, I could be wrong, but Apple's current strategy look unsustainable to me.
I'm not sure what's wrong with offering major new versions of your product at the upgrade price to everyone (new and existing users alike). Sounds perfectly sustainable.
That may or may not be a rational response. After all, if someone thinks an upgrade is worth $X, why should he or she care whether or not a new customer is getting the same price? On the other hand, a developer demonstrating that they value customer history and loyalty (with a discounted upgrade) is a strong signal that they value the long-term customer relationship. That is something a customer could rationally care about. Either way, the potential for existing customer anger is a problem developers will have to deal with.
Wil's post might also be a pre-emptive strike against potential, future customer anger. After all, if a customer complains that they're not getting a discounted upgrade, he can point them to this post.
Apple's development system appears to be optimized for the scenario that if you need some new method added, you can walk down the hall in your building at Apple and get someone to add it. But then they sell that API to paying customers who don't have that option.
The alternative is Google, who doesn't release any top-tier paid apps on Android or Chrome Web Store. Or host anything important on Apps Engine.
Google's business model isn't to release paid apps on their stores. They have many free apps that are downloaded by the 50's of millions and have 4.5-5 stars almost across the board so, yes, they do release top tier apps.
This differs from every OS vendor I'm aware of in the past. Just noting.
> they do release top tier apps.
Could you point out to me some of these apps where the alternatives are sold for top-tier prices?
Mail and calendars are also better than anything I've found in the market...but that's maybe just my preference.
TomTom costs, at last check, $95NZD. I've not bothered trying it.
(I have iOS tomtom for western Europe) Also, it has voices in many languages. So it will still work when you're out of coverage/country.
Remember, 99% of the land surface has crap/non-existant 2G/3G/4G coverage.
This can make a world of difference when travelling abroad when you can't be bothered getting a local data plan.
I definitely use GPS navigation more often when travelling than when in my home country.
There are companies that sell software that competes with things like Google Docs, Navigation, and other services. And yes, you can always point to things they do differently, but that's guaranteed. No one is going to pay $50 for something that exactly duplicates a free service that has more name recognition, so you by definition have to do something to differentiate yourself.
Google pretty much do the other way around: they build tools they need for their own developments (Closure Library, v8, Go...) then release it Open Source for others to use.
The second is more interesting though. They actually do use it quite a bit. Its the kind of thing they use internally, and the employees use for personal projects or when they need something technical for an external presentation. Also, app engine is probably built to serve a different purpose to their other services.
In the case of paid upgrades, if it pains customers and leads to lower device sales, then Apple will come up with a solution to it. Developers (and Apple's internal team as well) come in at a distant second place.
The line I occasionally hear in the apple dev community is "you can't change x/y/z on that component, you need to rebuild it from scratch", which time and again shows a very narrow focus in their tooling.
See http://t.co/EkqWISbS for an example, appears as a bug when you try and upgrade an app you've deleted -- but it shows the capability does exist.
I agree they won't enable it until they have a reason, the current situation is simple to manage from all angles.
Full price upgrades works for Angry Birds, but anything less episodic or standalone and you have problems. See Tweetie 2, for an example.
This issue is going to be rampant in the Mac App Store very very soon. It's been out for what, a year now? Time for a round of big updates... now you have two copies of all your apps.
What's the example, exactly? Genuinely curious. I upgraded to Tweetie 2 as soon as it came out. My impression was that it was very successful right up until Twitter bought Atebits.
Example headlines (Google "tweetie 2 paid update" for more):
"Tweetie 2 Pricing Controversy: An Interview with Tweetie's Creator ..."
"Tweetie 2: 'New App' – Will Spit On Existing 'Old App' Users | iSource"
"Still won't pay for Tweetie 2 upgrade? Try these Twitter apps ..."
"Tweetie pricing fuss highlights App Store flaw | Macworld"
In my experience, at least, it's more or less just a pathological behaviour that you can't escape.
This isn’t the case with productivity applications, necessarily – you can keep using Delicious Library 2 and it’ll keep working great, so we need a way to reward customers who say, “Yes, I’ll pay to have some extra functionality.”