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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Sparrow had a $4.99 (half-off) sale last weekend (https://twitter.com/lifehacker/statuses/223750237490126849). Borders on fraud, if you ask me - scamming people into buying what they had to have known by then they were planning on turning into abandonware a week later.

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I think you're being a little melodramatic here. When you buy an app, you're buying it at that point. You're not buying the developer's soul.

If they continue to work on it and improve it, it's pure gravy for the users. If they don't then you've already gotten what you've paid for. It doesn't border on fraud at all.

Bull crap.

Having a half-off sale a week before dropping the app isn't honest in any way. What... Google approached them yesterday and they agreed this morning? I doubt that.

More likely they've been in negotiations with Google for weeks. But it's in their best interests to move (in other words squeeze) as much product as possible before dropping the ball. Sleazy.

It's $4.99. I'm struggling to think what kind of software you used to be able to buy for that kind of money.

If you're arguing that $4.99 is a small enough amount that users should be happy at getting a product that would be abandoned a week later, then they should have disclosed that at the time of the sale and let the customers decide.

Dude, you're paying for existing features and functionality.

For all you know the next release was a paid upgrade. Would that be fraudulent too?

It's very unrealistic to expect a company to suspend normal operations because of the possibility, however likely, of a merger closing in a short time. With mergers, the deal is not done until it closes, and there are tons of things that can derail that or at least delay it. Imagine if Sparrow completely stopped doing business as usual, and the merger fell through. How much revenue might they have lost due to skipping a sale, etc? All the work necessarily involved in a merger is hard enough on a company, and it would be much worse if they flat out stopped running the company in the meantime.

Come on. They could have held the sale for one week. If the deal goes sour, you run it as you'd planned, and essentially everyone who last week bought it for $4.99 would have bought it this week.

This was a dick move. Well within their legal rights, and it's not like they really have to worry about negative PR when they're dissolving the company, but ethically it looks pretty sleazy.

Wow. Pretty harsh words for an app that costs less than $10.

Is the app unusable after it was bought by Google?

If it is still usable, are the features of the app not worth what users paid for?

Well, that's $10 times a large number of people. Remember the scam from The Office Space where they were stealing fractions of cents? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing

I don't think it's fair to call it fraud, but it isn't because of the numbers, but because it was sold as a computer program, not a service contract.

Great software for half off doesn't seem like a scam to me. The app still works.

Timing a sale right before an announcement you're well aware will drop sales numbers off a steep cliff looks pretty deceptive to me.

Deals fall apart at the last minute all. the. time. You can't just stop doing business.

You can delay your half-off sale for a week.

So buyers are just a hedge?

It's a standalone app, it's not going to stop functioning. $4.99 is a deal, regardless of whether there would be future versions or not.

> $4.99 is a deal, regardless of whether there would be future versions or not.

Then they should've put it on sale for $4.99 today, after the announcement, with a note in the description that it will no longer receive new features.

If it's indeed a deal, surely all the people who bought last week would've bought this week.

Yes, but it needs security updates and possibly bug fixes. That's the very least you'd expect when purchasing software. I bought Sparrow for the iPhone and Mac directly after they were released and really never used them.

But imagine that you just bought either Sparrow a few days ago, or even worse, made it part of your workflow.

It sucks.

On the other hand, it's always an inherent danger with proprietary software. Open software gets maintained by Debian for like forever ;). I learnt that lesson after the demise of Be Inc.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4271587

"I didn't buy Sparrow thinking I was paying for a piece of software that was feature-complete. I bought Sparrow mail as a piece of innovative software along with the promise of lots of great future updates to come."

I agree with this. I bought Sparrow when it had a pretty big bug with folder management on my IMAP account. I emailed them and they fixed it in an update, but there was still lots of room for Sparrow to grow (If Apple allows them to do push, other integration with the OS like Siri, etc).

It looks like Sparrow will turn into the Gmail client for iOS, which is a shit sandwich for everyone who doesn't use Gmail.

If you're buying something based on potential future improvements, and promises for those improvements are not part of the deal, then you have only yourself to blame if it doesn't work out. They have no obligation to conform to your expectations. If you don't want to have problems like this, then only buy software that actually does what you need right now.

Maybe $4.99 is a lot of money to him. It could be the amount which makes or breaks his startup. ;)

Unless Sparrow had a guarantee that future updates were coming, what you paid for was the software as it existed at purchase time. That's what you got.

Fraud? Scam? In any case, I suspect the victims could successfully get a refund from Apple.

I also suspect that the people who bought it are going to decide that the app is great, the Sparrow statement about "we will provide support and critical updates to our users" is at least something, and giving up the app for $5 is not worth it.

An alternate perspective is that they knew the product was going to be mothballed, or maybe even removed from the store entirely. For the late-adopters with bad timing they didn't want to charge full price for an app that wasn't going to see continued enhancements.

Either way, we're not talking about major dollars here. I'll bet most people purchased it with a credit card, and could file a claim for a refund with their card if they really felt so financially raped over the price of a beer.

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