To get rid of shovelware, Google should just add a search filter that allows filtering for "No In-App Purchases" and "Doesnt show ads" plus a "Costs money (no subscription)". But something tells me thats only good for the user, not the business.
That would effectively make it impossible for single/small dev teams to justify making apps for the Play store.
And I don't see why filter paid apps would solve anything. The aversion of the average Play store user to spending money on anything is in part the reason we are in this mess.
12 continuous years working as an Android developer and I've never bothered to personally release an app on the Play store. There is nothing to be gained from it except needing to support it without any hope of making back the cost of developing it.
Ads, I however agree with, are the bane of our time. Except, due to the aversion to paying for apps, it has become the only way small dev teams can make a living.
The change needs to happen on the consumer side for this one. Buy the apps that you enjoy using.
not to put too fine a point on it, but does a single person really constitute a team?
thou, one person does not constitute a team, sorry, not sorry.
What matters is actual usage, and while "one person team" does grate on me somewhat, it's in wide usage, and it's understood what it means. So, "sorry, not sorry", but you're wrong.
The problem with allowing IAP to be used for a shareware-like unlock is that there's nothing stopping shady developers from forcing a subscription on you later even though you already paid now. Forgot which one that was, but this kind of double dipping recently happened to a popular baby monitor.
See this 8y old thread about what EA does on Android: https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3mikbc/whats_...
(Too late to edit)
Partner wanted to play all the time. I discovered the videos ads were using up all of my prepaid data before the end of each month. I bought the premium version, which was a one-time purchase "back then".
They launched an app revision that had a handful of very noticeable bugs. Then they changed to a new app (rather than upgrade), pushed all the users to the new app, and made the ad-free version a subscription. What do you get for your monthly payment? Well, nothing significant, like you'd expect from a subscription.
In fact, they essentially crowd-sourced their Q&A content by letting users submit feedback when a pair was inaccurate, so users are fixing problems in the content for free.
Server usage?
Not to minimize the daily work of countless devs, but a quiz game is essentially a handful of databases, a dollop of quite straightforward logic, some static UI visuals, and then content scraping to fill the main Q&A database. The logic and UI visuals almost never need a rewrite. DynamoDB is pennies per month per user, and if you're a real POS you can use long advertisements to push away users temporarily when your RCUs/WCUs are getting close to a scale-up threshold, which has the nice side effect of increasing revenue if everyone watches the long adverts anyway.
I guess they expected a percentage of users to bail switching to subscription, and that doesn't cost them a cent. You said it best: shady
There are IAPs to unlock brushes and other things, and a small fee to buy everything. I believe I paid $15 one-time to get everything for Infinite Painter.
There are enough people happy to just make and maintain a cool thing, but I can't find their work.
- FFUpdater for installing browsers (Mull on my phone, Brave on my tablet because keyboard support)
- Termux for all my CLI work
- KeepassDX for passwords
- Syncthing for syncing
- Etar for calendaring
- VLC for media
- Kore to control my media center
- RCX for running local webdav servers (good for hosting Tiddlywiki and FeatherWiki locally on-device with WebDAV-based saving)
- Tiddloid for notetaking when I'm not using RCX instead
- Conversations for XMPP chat with family/friends
- KOReader for ebooks
- MullvadVPN for ... VPN
- OsmAnd~ for mapping, including offline maps
- "Puzzles" and Unciv for gaming
- Trail Sense for navigation/survival
If you're just running it as a local webdav server, you can just stick with the current version. But if you also use it for the more typical rclone tasks (keeping cloud storage synchronised), RoundSync is updated and fixes some things that were missing in RCX, like cronjobs.
In particular, I've consistently heard that it takes them forever to update app versions. At least https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/2316 seems to be fixed now - it used to require user interaction for each update, which doesn't work when you have dozens of apps (and updating from the notification also had some kind of bug requiring extra manual steps).
Maybe I should give them another try, how is the developer experience nowadays?
Maybe static analysis could determine whether the IAP unlocked a new feature/functionality or not, feeling into the labelling/filtering?
The developer now has two apps on the play store, still with no paying customers for either of them. The aversion to paying for quality is still present.
To avoid this problem in the past, authors offered the free version, and then paid unlock as a separate app package. So you could continue to use the original application you trialed, and the unlock package would turn it into the full version.
Unfortunately, this stopped when in-app purchases appeared.
The first and most obvious clue that what you are considering is wrong is the fact that you are admitting that if people were presented with a choice they would overwhelmingly opt out of such a system so pervasively that there wouldn't be any money in it at all.
> That would effectively make it impossible for single/small dev teams to justify making apps for the Play store.
This is an inversion of priorities. The dev's profession exits to create useful things for users. The users don't exist to enable the devs profession. If the only way an app can come into existence is through the exploitation and disadvantage of its users then the world would be better off if it didn't exist.
Convincing everyone that content online is free while taking payment for it is one of the greatest sleights of hand of the century. That kind of thing used to be called a con.
That statement just oozes entitlement...
As a high schooler it was pretty cool to publish a small game onto the play store and have friends download it from there.
Maybe.
On the other hand, when I see an app that includes ads or in-app purchases, I assume it's a low-quality app by default. Such a filter would be useful to me and wouldn't change my selection process. It would make it much less onerous over having to "manually" filter those apps out (which would make the app store much more useful to me).
I prefer apps that just charge me up front rather than use in-app purchases or ads.
If people can find apps that meet their needs which are also free, and free of ads and in-app purchases they should absolutely use those apps. Making it harder for users to find those apps is a much bigger problem than "but I wanted someone to pay me for giving them the same thing!"
The solution for people who want money is to make apps that offer valuable features the free apps don't have, not to make the free apps impossible to find because they're scared they can't compete.
It was better when apps had a fixed price like in the early 2010s. At some point it was decided that subscription apps were where the money was at, both for devs and for Apple who took a silent cut every month.
Of course them being hard to find on the store, is part of why they don't exist in the first place. Fixing that would help.
On net the play store is 100% useless because of ads and poor search. The only way to adequately search for apps is by using an actual search engine, even googles, in your mobile browser to find apps and then using the play store solely for installation.
The play store is a product so bad if it wasn't required to install software it would have no users. It is the windows ME of google's product lines. It is so bad that Google ought to be embarrassed to show it off in public.