As a non-game app developer, I WANTED THIS FOR YEARS!
Google (and Apple) calling my apps "free" did bring in massive amounts of bad reviews.
I think this is good news for any developer that wants to offer a "free-to-download" app with non-exploitative IAPs. Think of a magazine-app: People should get the app itself for free to be able to choose which issue they want to buy. There is no emotional engineering going on. You don't want to trick people into believing this app is useful if they don't spend money - in fact, you don't even want people to download your app if they won't spend money anyway. But the app store says FREE...
We had/have major problems with getting tons of bad reviews like "THIS APP IS NOT FREE, ASKS FOR IN APP PURCHASE!!11".
We played with the description, so it would start with "buy" or "purchase" (e.g. "BUY THE NEW ISSUE ABOUT XYZ"), which helped a little (although most people seem to skip the description). We tried screenshots of the point where one needs to purchase... which is sort of fine for iPad screenshots, but a waste for smaller phone screens. We do now also offer a lot more content for free initially, which seemed to have helped most.
I'm hoping for a consistent labeling of all apps (not only games!) that sets correct expectations for the user when downloading an app.
Google (and Apple) calling my apps "free" did bring in massive amounts of bad reviews.
I think this is good news for any developer that wants to offer a "free-to-download" app with non-exploitative IAPs. Think of a magazine-app: People should get the app itself for free to be able to choose which issue they want to buy. There is no emotional engineering going on. You don't want to trick people into believing this app is useful if they don't spend money - in fact, you don't even want people to download your app if they won't spend money anyway. But the app store says FREE...
We had/have major problems with getting tons of bad reviews like "THIS APP IS NOT FREE, ASKS FOR IN APP PURCHASE!!11".
We played with the description, so it would start with "buy" or "purchase" (e.g. "BUY THE NEW ISSUE ABOUT XYZ"), which helped a little (although most people seem to skip the description). We tried screenshots of the point where one needs to purchase... which is sort of fine for iPad screenshots, but a waste for smaller phone screens. We do now also offer a lot more content for free initially, which seemed to have helped most.
I'm hoping for a consistent labeling of all apps (not only games!) that sets correct expectations for the user when downloading an app.