Yup. And the problem now is if its not free, your product is not going to get ANY users. I really hope, everyone starts rolling back on freemium, because its hurting everyone (except customers).
The customers are then stuck with an app that might have been good but decays over time.
The real problem is that we just don't need 80 gazillion apps. The "app" market is extremely competitive, that's really what people are complaining about, profits have been driven down to basically nothing. Normally you would expect some developers to drop out of the market, which would help the situation, but two things are stopping that from happening, in my opinion.
First, the platform companies (Apple and Google) have been incredibly successful at promoting app development as a gold mine. For every developer who gets sick of it and moves on to something else, two people become "app developers".
Second, there's a startup bubble and the wisdom out there says you need an app or your startup is nothing. This partly relates to the first point, the hype around "apps", even years after Apple launched the app store, is deafening.
Or the reverse, pay $100 to pull your app from the store after its first year.
I almost think devs would be better off if it was per app. At least any devs planning to make a living off the store. It would cut down on a lot of the crappy spammy apps out there.
But let's just look at how things were for a second. If you sold an app for 4.99 you making a promise to the consumer that you would deliver value equal or greater than your price. And you if you didn't keep that promise it was up to the consumer to get a refund or suck it up. This was largely a pre-internet thing. The internet has made distribution a non-issue. Now you can get your products and ideas out there for little to no cost.
What we are seeing is an opportunity to show initial value to our users and offer higher value at a premium. This increases the reach of our work and helps us to find those 1000 true fans. Of course, we have to nurture those relationships. It's a lot of work.
I don't think there is anything wrong with premium pricing. People are use to it still. Why aren't we just focusing on the value we bring to people and whether it's premium or freemium none of it would be an issue.
Other times these are utilities. The Philips Hue lamps have an official app that's passable but the third party "Hue Pro" adds functionality. The free version does basically what the Phiilps app does or you can pay $2 and unlock all of the "fun" addons like music sync and lava lamp mode. Once I know that the app works and isn't buggy, I'm glad to pay. Same for launchers like Nova. Free version is a nice launcher that I vastly prefer to the stock launcher but I can pay a few bucks and get several more options. I probably wouldn't have paid $3 times 4 or 5 launchers just to find the one I liked but once I tried all of the free versions, I paid for the full version of the one I liked best.
It's like shareware. With the glut of options, you don't want to pay every time you try several solutions to find the best one so you try a bunch then buy the best. If I had to pay $1-10 to try every app on my phone, I'd just install less apps (or, to be honest, I'd probably try cracked copies to find the best option, then buy the best one).
As long as the quality of mobile apps is so varied, it really is hard to convince potential customers to pay any amount of money sight unseen. I've installed so many iOS and Android apps that lasted a total of 10 minutes on my devices it's not even funny. If I paid even $1 for each of them to learn those lessons, it would've turned me off to buying mobile apps at all.
It's hard for me to see how they're anything but a form of unregulated (yet) gambling/exploitation of people vulnerable to gambling.
Who in their right minds think that tens, hundreds of dollars is a good price to pay for virtual gemstones?
At any rate, for others that where unfamiliar with Supercell, I'm assuming parent means the makers of:
https://thinkgaming.com/app-sales-data/1/clash-of-clans/
A somewhat related article:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/mar/26/...
(And there's of course been a number of articles on "predatory" game design, based around compulsive/addictive behaviour)