How I Got Two iPhone Apps Refunded. | Hacker News Reader

How I Got Two iPhone Apps Refunded.

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7 pointszeedotme15 comments

Please tell me the app gets removed from the device if the user receives a refund.

Beejive 3.0 is quite awful. I gave up on it. I would ask for a refund also but I'm pretty sure they will take care of the problems so getting my $10 back for a few weeks or months isn't hugely important to me. My only regret is having suggested Beejive to some friends with shiny new 3GSs. Pretty awful first AppStore experience -- especially for $10.

Awesome. As a developer I would really like the unhappy users to get the refund. Joel's put it best in step 7 here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html

(I really miss the old Joel).

Well as a user, I would prefer a try-before-you-buy, as was common with Palm apps, which routinely offered 7 day trials and so on.

While I agree the article's style comes across as whiny (not to mention dishonest), I am really quite cross that the Apple store didn't support fixed time free trials as part of its original infrastructure.

$10 is not a lot for a good app, but for a lot of people it is a lot of money to just throw away for an app they don't want to use after trying it.

Even when apple will charge you for the refund but keep their cut from the original sale?

Looking at sales reports for an app I work on, Apple has only charged a negative amount for the 70% that we would have made from the app, not the full 100% of the price.

Even then. There aren't that many unhappy users for my product and I spend more time/money making them feel less angry than the money I could lose in the refund.

If enough users would be unhappy enough to request refund and and make it financially noticeable it would be time for me to take down the app and seriously redesign it.

$10 for an iPhone app is "Hella" money? I feel dirty for even visiting this cretinous web site. I didn't stay long enough to see if there were any advertisements but I hope not; I'd hate to find out this person benefited from me. And then this vermin says he purchased another application (a game no less) by "accident hehe."

You go to business with the customer base you have, not the customer base you wish you had.

I don't agree with that. You pick your customer base when you pick your product. I make something which is, essentially, a teaching supply. It is overwhelmingly bought by honest, fairly-well-off employed professionals. If I had written a fart app for the iPhone or a file sharing program this would not be true.

(I have heard writers of file sharing programs decry excessive piracy of their apps before. What did you THINK your average user would look like?)

Agree. The other way to pick customer base is pricing - I started getting much better reviews after simply raising prices from $2 to $5.

I guess my point was that there is broad customer base which you don't get to pick much - the 40 million people who bought an iDevice, but then as you pointed out it can be narrowed down to some segments which you like better than others.

To be honest, I thought it was a joke to start with - look at what he compares it to!

For 10bucks, I can get four iced espressos at Starbucks, eight bags of Swedish Fish, 9 soft serves from McDonald’s, or nine 99cent iPhone apps, etc., etc.

Ignoring the crappy maths towards the end there, I can't think of one time where I've been faced with a piece of software that could potentially enrich or ease my life on a day to day basis and thought "Hmm... maybe I'll just pig out on ice cream instead."

I had no idea that the software engineer had become so devalued. Seeing how greatly that point overshadows the rest of the (probably quite useful) piece, I can't help but think techies aren't really the intended audience.

It's a buyers market -- that's for sure. It's not so much that $10 is a bad deal but more so that BeeJive 3.x for the iPhone simply doesn't work right. For $10 it's less functional than a $0 IM app. I doubt the developers are to blame however they should examine their choice to work for a company that will release non-functional software with a (comparatively) high price tag. They'll be out on the street working for a company like that and that's the ultimate devaluation of developers IMO. I tend to doubt these guys were saying "Yep it's ready! Ship it!" they were probably asking for more time and someone in management decided it was too risky to let the competition get a head start on Push Notification support. They may have even calculated that someone who spend $10 with no obvious ability to get refunded would perhaps stick around while the developers had a chance to fix the many horrible bugs. Bad business.

I think you're being too charitable. The fact the author talks about getting a refund for a game by falsely claiming it was purchased by accident and goes to great lengths to discuss getting the refund, all the complaining on Twitter, etc. It's pretty clear the author sees $10 as outrageous.

Beejive on my 3G works fine; even with multiple accounts. I haven't seen it crash yet and I use it three - four days a week

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