I bought GoodNotes 5 and love it. One time purchase, and a great little app. Now GoodNotes 6 is out. Their “most popular plan” is an annual subscription. I just tried to look up how expensive it is - but their pricing page[1] lists a bunch of different plans available. It doesn’t list the actual prices. (Why on earth does a notes app have multiple usage plans? Horrible.)
They have a “one time payment” option. But I thought that’s what I already bought from the App Store when I bought it a couple years ago. I guess not. My totally fine, currently working version (v5) will probably randomly stop working at some point in the future and I’ll lose all my notes, because I suppose breaking totally working software is good business.
That pricing page is absolutely abysmal and indefensible, but has nothing to do with what the parent comment said (small one time purchase vs larger recurring subscription). There's a one time payment option (with no price, which is shitty) on that page for v6. That seems like it has exactly the functionality you wanted?
> They have a “one time payment” option. But I thought that’s what I already bought from the App Store when I bought it a couple years ago.
You said yourself you bought GoodNotes 5, and this is for GoodNotes 6.
There's thousands of games targeted at children that are exactly this.
There are publishers that drop reskin after reskin of the same game all with individual subscriptions, and they constantly try to kids from one into the other.
Then others clone that game and do the same thing. Fluvsies is an App Store virus.
And nobody is going to drop their prices because of the ruling.
This may be great for some publishers, but doesn’t benefit the consumer in any way. In fact as i consumer id much rather deal with Apple’s payment system than a separate payment mechanism for each app, especially when it comes to cancelling, changes etc
Yeah, it's mobile, so it's not all games with loot boxes and escalating pay to play. Some of it is infinite slop addictionware, brain rot, gambling, payday loan apps, shovelware, and spyware.
Apple sucks for their monopoly tactics, but it's very hard for me to have any sympathy for the rest of the mobile ecosystem. It's probably the most exploitative toxic software ecosystem.
If you’re an Indy developer making less than 1 million a year, you are paying 15%. Is it really not worth 15% (where if your product has value you should be able to charge enough to make up the difference) for credit card processing (3%-4%) and distribution?
I think the issue is not about what it's worth, but what they should be allowed to charge for. To me, the argument about "what it's worth" is fundamentally wrong.
As an extreme example, if some company found a way to charge me $100 every day or my head would explode, that obviously is worth $100 to most of us. However, I'm currently not having to pay any company to prevent my head from exploding, so maybe that's just not something I should have to pay for.
As I said, my point is just that it's not something I should be obligated to pay for.
But, if you're looking for counterexamples to show it can be done for less than a 15% cut, they're around. Almost every eBay category charges less than 15%, for example. And, as another user pointed out, Epic takes less than 15%. AliExpress charges 5-8% on average. Etsy is I think something like 6.5%.
Etsy charges 6.5% transaction fee + 3% payment processing fee + a flat $0.25 fee per transaction. That would end up being more than 15% for most Apple purchases of $1-$3.
eBay charges a final value fee of 12.9% and $.30 - $0.40 flat fee per order. And you pay a fee for international orders.
