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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I feel it's an obvious problem that apps that allow IAP are listed as free. Has google or apple fixed this yet?

When browsing for apps there you may see a top app being free and another costing $1. You pick the "free" one and it turns out it is useless without an IAP whereas the $1 app perhaps would not. It turns out the free app costs $2 in order to function as well as the $1 app.

The consumer friendly thing to do would be to list any app that has any IAP enabled to be listed as non free, either using some special labeling (category "freemium" rather than "free"), or by listing the price as an interval rather than as the minimum.

It's come to the point where I really miss the time when many apps existed in two separate versions, a free and a premium version. Would that not have been the solution to this problem?

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"You pick the "free" one and it turns out it is useless without an IAP whereas the $1 app perhaps would not. It turns out the free app costs $2 in order to function as well as the $1 app."

So uninstall it and shell out the $1 for the other one. FFS, why is this hard?

Well, when there are 1000 apps to choose from, you can install/uninstall a lot of apps before you find the one that's actually the best value for money.

The OP is essentially complaining about a lack of price transparency. And he's 100% correct.

It isn't hard, it's annoying. It's such a simple fix. I don't mind the freemium model but I do mind the bait-and-switch freemium model where you get the reputation and feature listing of a paid app, but list the price of a free app.

As a developer I feel this pain as well. On the WinRT platform you actually have the "trial version"-flag which allows the user to test it before they pay. This feature is useless in the same sense as paid app is, since everyone is going for the freemium model anyway to conceal the cost of the app.

Apple has a small note saying "Offer In App Purchases" below "Free" button. Though you have to view the app page for that.

In iTunes & Web, there's a section for popular IAP under the app icon.

Google has that too on the app page, right below the download button.

As far as I can tell though, there's no way to tell what the IAP are on Android. And because most of them involve buying "gems", I just don't bother with free any more.

It also shows up as a small + symbol below the installation in the app page and the search page. Anywhere you see a price, you can also see if it has IAP.

The two version solution (free/premium) doesn't allow sharing ratings. Developers don't like that, because they want their free uptake to give higher rating to their premium option. Splitting the options up would make perfect sense if the two apps are grouped up in some way.

I can see that from the developers' perspective the two app solution is bad (also from a maintenance perspective etc.)

For users it's also bad because if upgrading is switching you are likely to lose the data (settings, game progress), but since I'd rather do that it feels like the freemium thing must be horribly broken.

The two app solution doesn't require losing data. I don't know how they do it, but plenty of Android apps have a paid version that only "unlocks" the paid capabilities of the free version. That way, you clearly see in the Store that it has a free and paid version, but you don't lose anything when upgrading.

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