Comment Bigger picture (Score 0) 103
This is just another symptom of all that's going badly wrong for software engineers as a profession.
In all other "professional" disciplines (law, medicine, financial, engineering etc) your worth increases with age - except software engineering.
In software engineering you are viewed as "expensive and outdated" once you reach middle age.
You wouldn't get a graduate lawyer to handle your divorce, a graduate med to operate on you, or a graduate to return your business accounts.
Yet graduates are just fine, cheap and dandy for writing that great App idea you have which is going to make you rich and pay for their subways for a couple of weeks.
I'll be pointing this out to my kids if they try to follow me into the profession I thought was a good bet.
The consumers view of software is that it's "valueless", free and their birth right to obtain it without cost.
Which is why they get pissed if they are asked for even a tiny amount of cash to use it.
I get regular hate emails from people who download my Apps, which give them enough to try out the product before they purchase, telling me how much I suck.
My standard response to them is "beggars and buskers make more and give you less. You'd think nothing of tossing 99c in the hat of a stranger on the street yet you can take the time to email me telling me that my months of labor aren't worth the same?"
One person even replied with "I'm sorry for my attitude".
So now it's gotten to the political level and Apple has side stepped the issue with a single word change.
What a cop out.
Those who say Apple gear is expensive fail to realise that the company is including in the cost the huge investment in their software development.
You buy your Mac/Pad/Phone and each year, for about 4 or 5 years, you get free annual software updates and bug fixes.
Microsoft never did that, they charged you and worse...
Giving it away for free, Google, is worse as it just strengthens this consumer perception that software is valueless.
What the consumer doesn't realise is that with Google they are the product which is being sold to pay for their development.
So the cost of software is hidden by the big guys, either in the shelf price of the hardware or the services sold through it.
Don't get me wrong, I don't believe in re-inventing the wheel and we would never have gotten here without free software.
Kudos to those upon who's shoulders we stand.
As an App developer you have 3 choices.
1) Paid Upfront App - too much risk consumers think, it might be crap. Resulting in low install numbers
2) In-App purchase - great except for the winning free loaders who spoil it for everyone else.
3) Advertising - Unless you can get serious volume of installs and session length it's not going to pay.
There is a 4th one, which is services, but not all Apps can sell services.
On a final note I've seen my daily App installs plummet since the introduction of "GET".
I don't blame Apple, I blame the perception of those consumers who think they have the right to someone else's work for free.