It's the only app I've ever bought whose developer has done that bullshit.
I won't make that mistake again.
The alternative would have been to just release a separate app called Halide 2 and stop updating Halide 1. In that case, version 1 would probably fall apart pretty quickly due to OS and camera changes year to year.
I’m genuinely curious if you’d have preferred we stopped updating Halide 1, because we’re always trying to find the best way to support users while keeping the light on.
Updates have always been a PITA on iOS. There’s no way to charge for them.
Following that, we had a series of bug fix updates while we worked out the next major update. It’s maybe 2/3 done, but we had to shelf it until after the Kino launch for external reasons.
New version every 2-3 years which required a purchase. It was a few hundred dollars every time you wanted to upgrade (people may not remember this, but PS was the "value" product when it launched; professional software was often low 4 figures).
There's tonnes of companies that have legacy 'pay upfront' models, that hit the wall as they'd saturated their markets, then their revenue stream dropped off and all of a sudden saw the wall of transitioning to web/mobile needing to happen and didn't have the funds to pull it off.
I'd almost completely forgotten about it until I was challenged by a prospect in a meeting monday 'is this one of these new lease software systems, I want to own it!" had to educate him on the way the world worked now...
Subscriptions bring in steady money that allows for better forecasting and resourcing.
Releasing a Very Big Paid Update every year or two years brings in an unknown lump sum of money with a tail end that might or might not be enough.
I'm not sure which group the Halide changes mentioned above fell into but just on the general topic I think it's a fair expectation.
They don't "give" you the new version. They take away the app you paid "once", and provide you with a version with an expire date. So you have no choice. You either pay them, again, or lose access to the v2 (subscription based) app.
I don't mind paying for good software, I even think Hallide is worth $60. But I won't make the same mistake again. So best of luck Lux! I really wish you all the success. If you treat your customers right this time.
That is "forever updates" = no but "take away what you had" also = no. It was a period of updates with a dropoff date of where you left off. This lines up with my expectations of a one time purchase in that I'm not expecting 50 years of feature updates when buying software just because they haven't went out of business yet I'm just expecting I keep the feature access I have at the end, which is what these posts from many different folks are all claiming.