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Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

Why is the iOS app free? After playing with the in-browser demo for just a minute that would've been an extremely easy $2 to part with!

EDIT - oh, it's got ads in it. Removed. Sorry, if you ship your software stuffed with some 3rd party crap that most certainly nobody wants and then offer to disable that part for money, then it's an instant No. Please make a proper paid version with none of this nonsense and I will gladly pay for it.

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You can wish for a perfect world all you want, but any developer who wants to earn money with an iOS app knows that the basic version has to be free. If you like the app, pay the in-app purchase and be happy... It's pretty unfair to punish the developer for the realities of mobile app markets. http://www.marco.org/2013/09/28/underscore-price-dynamics

I don't demand that he abandons his ways. I'm asking for another version that is paid and cruft-free.

You do realize that Apple discourages multiple versions of the same app since releasing in-app purchases, right? It clutters up the App Store having paid and free versions of apps. I wish they would just release a proper app demoing system...

Any specifics on how they discourage this? Geniune question. There's plenty of high-ranking apps with both paid and free-ad-supported versions, e.g. Cut The Rope.

Here is a discussion on the topic between a few developers with Apple's reason for rejection, from a few years ago. http://iphonedevsdk.com/forum/business-legal-app-store/93228...

I believe Cut The Rope pre-dated the push for keeping apps singular with IAP to unlock additional content.

I admire your stance against ads.

However, you are refusing to pay the developer $0.99 (correction: $0.70 to the developer) for the exact same product which you said would "easily" pay $2 for.

If you are genuinely so against this business model, why do you own an iOS device? It's Apple pushing this, not the lone developer you've arbitrarily decided to punish.

Agreed. I installed the app, played a piece, but when I tried to play something else I got a video ad blasting out at twice the volume of the music. Deleted the app.

Right, after playing through a whole song on the web, my first reaction when I saw that there was an app version available was: Oh, that's brilliant, the web app (which I thought was the end of the story) is actually an interactive demo for a paid app. So I was surprised to see that the app itself was free -- but perhaps this is the first time the web version has gotten any traction, so the developer was unprepared for customers with this set of expectations.

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