> If I were to spend years and years making the perfect toaster and I charge $1,000 for it (to pay for the engineering and design work), you're saying it's absurd NOT to buy it?
It's never absurd to choose not to buy anything. But your analogy gets in the way of what is absurd. We're not talking about charging $1000 dollars (the same price as a nice laptop, a middling DSLR, or a crappy used car) for a toaster.
We're talking about $20 (the same price as a delivered pizza, a middling steak, and less than two tickets for an hour and a half movie) for a polished piece of software.
What's absurd is asserting that that's too much to ask for the product of months of engineering and design work. You certainly don't have to buy it! It's totally ok if it's not worth $20 of your money, to you.
But asserting that the authors ought to value their work less than a pizza, that they're doing something wrong by asking a not-unreasonable pizza-money price for it, is entitled, race-to-the-bottom mentality crap.
Engineers are expensive, iOS engineers doubly so. This meme that their work is worth less than a candy bar, let alone a pizza, is a toxic devaluation of the worth of every engineer working in the software field
coda: They're currently both the #2 paid app and #2 top-grossing app in the App Store, so the demand is certainly there at $20. Devaluing their work by launching at less would have accomplished nothing but leaving money on the table.