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Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

I actually wish they banned all cross-app promotion, which is the second most annoying thing after the in-app purchase promotions.

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Completely agree as a user. I know this would annoy developers to no end, as their scammy "Load this App and will give you 5 jewels" promotions are a pretty common way to get App store "Popularity" juice, but first, it's annoying within the context of an app, and second, it artificially boosts the popularity of a secondary app that might be complete crap.

Still waiting for the authoritative metacritic/rotten tomatoes of the app store to develop. I'm happy to spend upwards of a thousands dollars a year on the App Store - but, other than trusting podcasts/trusted bloggers, it's pretty damn hard to find anything useful on it without wasting a lot of time and money.

The practice of giving incentives to download apps has been officially banned (by Apple) for over a year, but I don't think the apple reviewers have been enforcing it uniformly.

What I wouldn't give for a X day trial period on all apps. Hell, let categorization drive the length of trial period, I don't care. Please just give me a way to "try before I buy".

Agreed. I hate "free" apps that are completely hamstrung until you buy some dumb in-app purchase.

Yes, and very annoying for my children. And for me.

Excellent point. On the iPad, my young kids can do most things easily, except deal with these advertisements. It usually exits the app, brings up Safari and they wonder what's going on. The second most annoying thing is OpenFeint - Can't this be globally turned off?

The way Apple's restrictions work, you can't build global opt outs like that. Services, for the record, would love to be able to do it; in fact, I was once begged by some companies in the analytics space (think Flurry) to build a global opt out for their products on jailbroken devices, and after contacting other companies I found out they all wanted to do it but couldn't (so I built it).

You can block kids from using in app purchases by going to Settings > General > Restrictions > In-App Purchases

That doesn't stop the app from prompting for the in-app purchases, it just prevents unwanted transactions.

Go download Talking Tom (it's "free") and see what parents complain about. Turning off purchasing doesn't stop my 2 year old from hitting one of three or four "upgrade" buttons available on screen at any given moment, bringing up a popup or opening a browser or the app store for cross promotions. I would have actually bought the damn thing because of the entertainment it provides if it weren't for refusing to support the total sleaziness of that monetization method.

Exactly - I'm actually considering going to the Kindle because it supposedly has a mode where you can determine what your children have access to.

I don't know if that will help. You can already lock down iOS pretty tightly for kids. It's the apps themselves that are the problem.

There's just a huge, annoying trend of making apps crippled or annoyware until you buy some ridiculous IAP. AFAIK, that situation is not much different on Kindle/Android.

It's a really simple choice for an app developer, you either charge up front in which case apple for the most part controls the environment where the decision to buy or not is made. Or you charge with an in app purchase in which case you control the environment in which the decision is made. You can A/B test e.t.c.

I get that, but it's still sneaky. I would like to see the AppStore/PlayStore create a third category to add to "Free" and "Paid" being "IAP"

It's to the point where in the AppStore I look to see if the top related purchase are some $4.99 coin pack or whatever and if so, I'm out.

I have personally experimented with TapJoy and even though it worked as a way of bumping my ranking for a small period of time I choose to never use it again and now that I understand those networks I would be pretty happy if they didn't exist anymore. I wouldn't want to get rid of all cross promotion though since if I really liked an app I may want to know more about other apps the developer made.

So you'd ban all the free demo versions of paid apps?

Arguably, the existence of a full and demo version - along with limits on features or usage period of the demo - will be all the "promotion" you need.

No need for having two apps clogging up the store - have just the app, and have the paid version unlocked via IAP.

Not sure I agree, in-app purchases have turned so scammy recently (buy 1000 fun points for $100!) that I've taken to not even looking at games if they include IAP anymore.

This is actually really painful for both devs and users - the main thing being that recovery of the paid upgrade will be finicky and unreliable. The UI for recovering an in-app purchase is the same as the buying UI, which leads many users to mistakenly believe they are being double-charged.

Who can blame them, the UI blows.

Since devs themselves also do not get any user-specific information when an in-app purchase is sold, it becomes pretty much impossible for your support channels to verify someone actually owns what they say they own.

Until the API improves (not holding my breath, it's been like this for, what, 3 years now?) IAP-driven upgrades will hurt both users and developers.

> "The UI for recovering an in-app purchase is the same as the buying UI, which leads many users to mistakenly believe they are being double-charged."

This makes sense for low-price + IAP apps, but not the free + IAP model mentioned in the thread you're replying to.

Free + IAP seems fine, and it's probably been the most popular PC/Mac software sales method since the 90s.

This impacts free + IAP models also. Here's the classic use case:

1. User gets a shiny new iPhone. 2. User installs my (free) AwesomeApp on new device. 3. User is missing premium AwesomeApp features, is now confused about why. 4. User goes to IAP part of app and tries to recover the IAP/premium features, except Apple's UI here would lead user to believe they are being charged for the IAP again.

This is often followed by:

5. User contacts support and is very confused. Support cannot verify whether or not user owns the IAP, because the App Store is a black box and we get no information about purchasers.

Isn't that what the restoreCompletedTransactions api is for? It's the fault of the app developer for not using it, and forcing the user to go through the purchase flow again.

Is recovering upgrades finicky and unreliable? The only app I can think of which has the functionality is Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer [0], and it's pretty clear and seems to work quite well. The UI isn't easily confused with in-app purchases, although you do have to go to "In App Store" from the main menu. Once there, you click Recover and it just works.

[0] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ascension-chronicle-godslayer...

There are API methods that directly handle recovery. However, it wasn't until recently (earlier this year) that the App Store review process finally required developers to implement the restore mechanism.

Then maybe people should be putting more effort into this setup than in goosing popularity juice and user-hostile co-promo bs.

Institutional buyers, especially schools, usually can't do IAPs. Heck, we're lucky when they even have an app budget at all.

No, I think the idea is that there are some full blown apps that seem to serve only to push sales of other apps.

Not a big deal for demo + full version apps, but when you pay full price for an app (or download a free, non-demo app) and keep getting pushed to buy other apps it gets pretty annoying.

Some apps have done it tastefully, like Temple Run. Others like Scramble (and my assumption is all Zynga apps) just make it a drag.

No, I wouldn't. In fact, I think the try-then-buy model was actually the intended primary use of IAP.

I thought IAP was for hats for your game charaters.

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