Very good point. People will happily pay 50 pounds a month for an IPhone and thinking nothing of it. But then really struggle to pay a penny for an app that runs in that iPhone. There’s some funny psychology going on.
Paying for software vs phones is not really an apples to apples comparison.
A better comparison would be how people gladly pay ten bucks a month for spotify/netflix but would probably never pay that for messaging and IMHO that's where the industry should be going.
People in the past also thought music and movies should be free and pirated the shit out of them, but by making it simple and accessible, for ten bucks a month, most people with a job just won't bother with piracy anymore, even though they gladly pay for something they'll never actually own.
So, the billion dollar question is, how do we transfer that model to messaging?
I keep dreaming about a Pied Piper like decentralized internet.
What i don't like is that "everything" is 10$ a month. I would like to subscribe to some payment aggregator where they charge me X dollars a month in one transaction, then pays it out to developers/service providers. This way things could go down in price too, since the fees would be lower because of less transactions. This way cheaper services like messaging could be 1$ a month without being eaten up by fees.
Netflix and spotify give me quick access to lot of content and I value it. I don’t care what software gives me this content.
With messaging it’s different. Transferring messages is relatively simple topic to do as a software. But the cost of running and maintaining it is hard and that’s what users don’t care.
There is very little to no awareness of what it takes to create software. We, the developers who have released our work for free, have allowed this to happen. It feels like mobbing, heck, we keep reading about other devs mobbing others by opening GitHub issues and demanding new features or bugfixes for software they did not pay for. I really hope that we can do something about raising awareness.
I can’t remember if it was always that way. When the App Store opened I guess there was a standard price of 59p for an app. Before that, 59p would have been seen as a ridiculous price to pay for a copy of software. Imagine buying windows 95 on a CD for 59p. By setting the bar so low for app prices at the start, it’s possibly just become the way it is now.
This got worse with the introduction of GitHub. Obnoxious users were always a problem, but before centralized OSS warehouses at least they had to go to the project's web site and mailing list.
Where they'd be told to get lost if they misbehaved.
With GitHub, the branding of products is lost and most credit goes to GitHub. If a user isn't satisfied, he does the proverbial left-swipe and goes to the next project in a second.
If you tell a user to get lost, you violate the tenets of the new corporate sponsored cultural revolution: Newcomers are always right.
The last 10 years have been a coordinated attack on OSS to make developers obedient and silent cogs. It works, because at present they are showered with money in return.
One big hangup users have is a difference in expectations. They know what they're getting with the money they pay towards their iPhone. Heck - most users will gladly pay exorbitant prices for a cup of coffee as long as it meets their expectations. The same cannot be said for a given app they pull off the App Store. The quality experience can vary greatly from app to app. Even then, an app that fits your lifestyle may not fit mine, so a recommendation isn't necessarily a guarantee of value.
For me I think it is a question of ownership. It is easier to pay for something you actually own. Software already is intangible, but add in modern licensing, app stores, etc and you really do not have any ownership over your software. Even in the case of open source software like signal, Apple could chose to boot them off the app store tomorrow and I would lose my "investment".
There was a time in the 90s/00s where you bought software in a big box, and it came with all sorts of manuals and such. The tangible assets (manual, floppy, box, whatever) along with the licensing agreement made that software much more valuable than the software we use today.
I remember when some of them came with hardware dongles. Adobe After Effects had a dongle that you had to attach to your keyboard cable in order for the app to launch. The mental value I attributed to that dongle was immense. I think I still have it around here somewhere...
I'd venture to guess that speed/simplicity of installing an app is also something users subconsciously factor in. The faster/smoother the installation, the less appreciation they have for the app. I remember installing Windows 95 from floppy disks.. boy oh boy, I appreciated every file that was successfully installed and admired it every time it booted into desktop.
