I wonder what caused people to value mobile software so cheaply. Like, you can get away with charging quite a bit for desktop software, but the second that you start charging above $5 for a mobile app, people generally see that as a bad thing.
Plenty of good answers in this thread. But heres another: mobile app development made it easier than ever for new people to sell software. Pricing is hard and scary. And people tend to underprice. Theres an epidemic of it in mobile.
Last time was Lyd (Sonos control on watch) the watch has a lot of paid apps and very few for free.. and manymany have a subscription payment system.. which I kinda dislike but understand why.
Mobile`s never been that performant until recently - maybe iPhone 6ish onwards and people associated the performance with the cost; I believe the landscape is changing right now but people will expect support for almost all platforms and Apple`s made that easy recently.
Forreal. Most people spend a lot of time on their phones.
I just got hit with nostalgia for super monkey ball on the App Store
Weirder than the app thing is that Ill spend $20 to go to a theater (before COVID ofc) but if I see that renting a movie on iTunes is $2 Ill just go without it.
Another similar fun fact: When Apple first announced in app purchases, they were only available for paid apps. Because free apps should always be free. A few things have changed...
I think a lot of us felt the writing was on the wall the moment Sega got on stage and announced Super Monkey Ball - a AAA game - would be $10 on launch day for the App Store. We had to be below that price. That was now the standard. Ever since, its been a race to the bottom.
One part is that its psychologically small. Only as big as the phone. But also the people who build products that command higher prices just have less users, but make up for it with the price
frfr, some app store apps are $100 for the desktop version and $5 for the mobile version. no difference in features.
I`m not even trying to call anybody out here, I do the exact same thing. It really just occurred to me now like, wait, I`m willing to spend $20 to watch a movie for 2 hours, but I can`t remember the last time I spent like $2 on an app and that`s really weird.
Thats interesting. Ive never really thought about it. I wonder if it has something to do with apps generally being free nowadays so we just subconsciously expect all of them to be free/cheap.
I think I have that mentality for both actually. Which is strange considering I know how much time and work goes into developing software.
