Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrDresden | Hacker News Reader

That will filter out a lot of high quality apps made by single person dev teams that include the option for users to support them through in-app purchases.

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.

View on HN

I'm not bothering to make open source apps for Android because they'll be inevitably flooded out by 1000 ad- and microtransaction-infested variants, and I'm not even allowed to distinguish myself from them with my primary feature, "free of that garbage" (IIRC you can't even mention it in the app description, definitely not in the name).

There are enough people happy to just make and maintain a cool thing, but I can't find their work.

F-Droid is what you're looking for. Both as a developer and as a user.

I hate "this!" comments, but F-Droid is the thing that keeps me an Android user and makes me a die-hard proponent of alternative app stores (and why I'd use an iPhone if I could get something like F-Droid (with Termux) on it). Even phones with no other app store can install F-Droid, and it has enough good software that I can do most everything I need with only F-Droid.

    - 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

I know this is a laundry list, but my point is that it's a trove of exactly the sort software I like to develop and use. Thanks for mentioning it!

You might like to know that RCX has a new, maintained fork in RoundSync [0].

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.

[0] https://github.com/newhinton/Round-Sync

I wish there was a desktop equivalent of this app, time to fork RcloneBrowser ;)

I've considered it, but I'm not sure if the audience size is worth it and the store used to be so broken that I don't know if it wouldn't be even more frustrating to work with them than it is to work with Google Play.

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?

I think you just argued that we should go back to shareware. Free to download and then a one-time payment to unlock all functionality. That's also easy to support officially in the store and it's easy to add a filter for.

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.

Quiz Duel (MAG Interactive) did this.

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

To be fair, even if the payment is IAP, the publisher can still attempt double dipping, by first unpublishing the original app (which to be fair, while user-hostile, has the benefit that they don't have to bother supporting different/new hardware)

See this 8y old thread about what EA does on Android: https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3mikbc/whats_...

s/even if the payment is IAP/even if the payment is not IAP/

(Too late to edit)

That's how drawing apps like Concept and Infinite Painter are priced. Free download, no sign up, several good features in the basic version.

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.

We are already there, that is basically what open core is all about, a new marketing name for a generation born in FOSS.

> That will filter out a lot of high quality apps made by single person dev teams

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.

Integrating ads with your app isn't merely trying to manipulate your users in a way that is liable to exploit, harm, disadvantage, or oppose their interests. It is virtually certainly compromising their privacy in a fashion that isn't immediately obvious and opening up a security hole that may be used to harm them further.

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.

And lo there is another way an app can come into existence: through paying users. Which they don't. The users prefer to pay with their "exploitation" so we have today what we all (as a society) requested.

To me it’s kind of wild we call such products “free”. Like YouTube claims to be free, but it’s ToS prohibit use unless the user pays with their headspace and attention to ads (and really awful ones to boot). If you use an ad blocker and refuse to pay, it will now tell you you’re not allowed to use it. So it’s “free”, but you need to pay to use it. And they will try to enforce it. But don’t overthink it, and repeat after me - “it’s free™” (so long as the dues are paid)

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.

> 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.

That statement just oozes entitlement...

If that seems hard to chew on try this on for size. Food doesn't exist to demonstrate the art of the chef. Without someone to eat it becomes rot. This doesn't degrade the chef nor his art it defines it.

You just need to change your filter rule such that a single iap to upgrade from free to premium version, can be considered similar to a paid app with no iap.

> single person dev teams

not to put too fine a point on it, but does a single person really constitute a team?

“One person team” is a fairly common phrased to describe such a situation I believe. The “team” is the group of developers responsible for something, which may sometimes only contain one person.

yea, sets with one or zero members exist.

thou, one person does not constitute a team, sorry, not sorry.

You're technically correct, which, as we know, is the best (/s) kind of correct.

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.

Words mean whatever the standard usage of them is. You can’t just declare a word to have a certain meaning. This is not my opinion - this is what scholars of language believe about language. The meaning of words changes over time as society finds other uses for them.

https://ludwig.guru/s/one+person+team

> 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

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.

> 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.

As a high schooler it was pretty cool to publish a small game onto the play store and have friends download it from there.

Easily solveable by offering the same app for free with IAP (or as shareware), and the same app for a price as a one-time purchase.

Thanks to sandboxing, the paid version would not be able to access data created by the free version, when trialing.

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.

It feels like an IAP would be more fitting than an entirely separate app, though -- it'd be a shame to require a new listing just to work around this filtering.

Maybe static analysis could determine whether the IAP unlocked a new feature/functionality or not, feeling into the labelling/filtering?

What does this solve?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com