Comment by borplk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by borplk | Hacker News Reader

What I find particularly messed up is the huge relative difference in the price of the mobile device and the apps that people install on it.

When it comes to buying the device, thousands of people line up outside Apple stores and pay - I don't know - $600 for their device.

Android devices are the same, many people easily spend ~$400-$600 on their device that they may only use for one year.

So a good chunk of mobile users are people with good income, living in rich countries and are well capable of paying $5-$10 for their apps that they run on their expensive/high-end devices.

Yet when it comes to paying for apps they struggle as if their monthly income is $10.

There are many factors involved but I think the most significant one is by far the psychological perception of the value of apps that has been created due to App store and Play store pricing.

There are also many people who are willing to release free and good-enough quality apps because it's their hobby or maybe they want to create a portfolio for themselves.

This reduces the perceived value of these apps.

In contrast people can't find other professional services/tools for free. I mean, say, lawyers, doctors, accountants, electrical engineers, etc... don't produce and provide their services/work for free where you can download a free health checkup from a doctor whose hobby is being a doctor.

So the perceived value remains high.

Software engineers are unique in this regard because they 'discount' their work constantly and justify it by saying 'i love doing this'.

Just as well: there are people spending thousands of dollars in cutting edge PCs or Home Theatre systems, and then playing only pirated games.

And in the Appstores case the free alternative is even legal!

One minor reason could be lack of physical media. In old days people received a bunch of disks or a dvd with nice cover art which they can put on a bookshelf.

Now it is all 1's and 0's coming over the wire(less). There is no sense of ownership. People are reluctant to pay for something that they don't touch or own.

One reason could be that consumers aren't technically owning anything, but merely being sold a license to use an application/movie/music for some random amount of time.

FWIW, how true that is does depend where you are.

Here in the EU, the CJEU rejected the 'it's only a licence' argument and characterised software downloads (that aren't explicitly limited to a fixed length of time) as normal sales, in Oracle v Usedsoft -- in particular, they're sales for the purposes of the First Sale Doctrine. So I could buy your app, use it, then extract the apk and sell it on to someone else, and you couldn't sue me for copyright infringement (as long as I remove the apk from my own phone, of course). (IANAL).

I'm not familiar with US law but my impression is that, on the whole, most states' legal systems are a whole lot less consumer-friendly than the EU, so presumably the same is not true over there.

Computing is becoming a culture of free. I wonder where the users expect we get our money from.

I don't think it is app pricing that is the issue. I think it is far simpler. With a phone, you are spending a lot of money, but you are getting an actual physical thing.

With software, you are spending money on bits. Spending even small amounts of money and getting nothing physical in return just feels very odd after decades of consumerist stuff acquisition and a few hundred thousand years of hunting and gathering.

A case to counter your argument: Magic: the gathering online. Many people are paying hundreds of dollars per year for what's essentially bits and a purely digital experience. That experience is just worth that much to them though.

The moral here would be: make something as good, market it accordingly, and see the money rolling in.

I would argue that authors are with software engineers on this. You can find many free works online from authors who were unable to get a publisher interested. They may not be as organized as software engineers, but they are definitely out there.

Doctors and Lawyers are part of a cartel, hardware is an expensive industry to enter.

This is all basic economics, supply and demand and marginal cost.

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