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Apps that shouldn't be Subscriptions (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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What is the most useless app that you have seen being given as a subscription?

For me, I tried a 'minimalist' launcher app for Android that had a 7 day trial or something and they had a yearly subscription based model for it. I was aghast. I would literally expect the app to blow my mind and do everything one can assume to go that way. In a world, where Nova Launcher (Yes, I know it has been acquired by Branch folks but it still is a sturdy one) or Niagara exist plus many alternatives including minimalist ones on F Droid, the dev must be releasing revolutionary stuff to factor in a subscription service.

Second, is a controversial choice, since it's free tier is quite good and people like it so much. But, Pocketcasts. I checked it's yearly price the other day, and boy, in my country, I can subscribe to Google Play Pass, YouTube Premium and Spotify and still have money left before I hit the ceiling what Pocketcasts is asking for paid upgrade.

Also, what are your views on one time purchase vs subscriptions? Personally, I find it much easier to purchase, if it's good enough even if it was piratable, something if it is a one time purchase rather than repetitive.

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[–] 149 points 2 years ago (5 children)

A watch face for a smart watch.

This one guy made a really popular Android Wear watch face that mimicked the Pixel lockscreen. It only cost a few bucks, and people loved it. Due to some personal things in his life, he had to sell the app to a new developer to make ends meet. The new developer then started charging something like $7/WEEK subscription for a watchface that he didn't even develop in the first place, and runs entirely locally on the device so it's not like he's maintaining any servers or anything.

Absolutely absurd.

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  • [–] 47 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    What. If that business model actually works for him, something is wrong with this world.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    It does work. People are distracted and are not reading every message correctly. And payment processing in the appstores is also kind of easy - so you might be able to scam a few people into subscribing and they might not notice this directly. You know that you are not checking your credit card bills in details every month. So you can get a nice revenue stream of unsuspecting customers for a few month until you've burned down every little bit of trust and user base you had

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I too ran into an Android Wear watch face that mimicked the Pixel lockscreen. However, it was priced X INR(Indian Rupee) per year in my country and was decently cheap. However, I soon ran into another app, which was a one time purchase, that did what it did mainly(sync and show phone and watch battery on each other) and worked on most lock screens. So the latter was a proper kind of app design amd atleast not subscription hell.

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