Gizmodo bangs the stupid drum regarding paying for iPhone and iPad apps
Would You Pay $15 for a Better iOS Mail App? burbles Ashley Feinberg for Gizmodo today. This was provoked by Mail Pilot’s developer having the sheer audacity to charge fifteen whole dollars for an entirely new IMAP email client. THE NERVE!
Feinberg further prattled:
That price would be steep for any app
especially one that’s competing against multiple free, perfectly usable alternatives.
Because, as we all know, you’d have to be a total idiot to pay for an app where “free, perfectly usable alternatives” exist. Free, perfectly usable alternatives are always the best kinds of apps! Let’s never use anything apart from free, perfectly usable alternatives, such as commercial, possibly amazing, productivity-boosting, time-saving, value-for-money alternatives!
So the question is, are you willing to pay $15 for the app? Is any app really worth that much?
Clearly not, because developers don’t need to eat or pay mortgages or try anything new or do anything amazing. Really, they should be there to do our bidding and release apps entirely for free. Who cares that they’ll then have to stop developing as a job and instead do it in their spare time as a hobby? As long as we all get our “free, perfectly usable alternatives”, everything will be great!
Haha… Several LOLs while reading this.
Great rant. Happily landed on your site for the first time today. So tired of the culture of expecting everything for nothing, especially intangible things like design and development.
You would think a tech writer like Ashley Feinberg would have more sense than to expect all competing apps to be free or dirt cheap.
I recently paid $70 for for 1password on my mac and ipad, as the many free / cheap alternatives I had tried just weren’t up to scratch. It has been money well spent saving me plenty of time and effort.