Sure, for programmers and command line users there will be alternatives, but that still leaves a large market.
Y'know what's going to kill Apple indie development in our reality? Apple. A lot of the paid shareware has a long pedigree, and the upcoming de-Carbonization will put an end to many small-shop software.
They may be making useful tools, which their customers really need, but they haven’t been good (in the sense most people mean by good on Mac, which is notably different from on other platforms) for a long time.
* Guaranteed updates/bug fixes
* Better support
* More polished product
There are free alternatives to basically everything, but people still pay for stuff.
(though some paid software in the recent years also have half-assed, incomplete wikis for documentation... my guess is that the proliferation of open source software made a lot of newer developers think that this is how software is supposed to be documented)
I still do it because of passion for the project, but it would certainly be easier to be paid for it!
Such a bold statement. Numerous times paid software produced errors, which went unfixed until the product was discontinued and then you had to buy a new version.
Unfortunately there will always be a small number of companies using scummy tactics like that, but not most of them.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
Conflating freeware and free software is a really annoying flaw of the English language.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for people making a profit from their dev work but when I see something as basic as a cpu temperature meter costing $30 on the Apple store, I'm going straight for the free version. What's even worse with apps like these on the Mac in particular is that the developers often bloat them with useless features in order to justify the price, so in my case I'd end up paying $30 for something I'm only going to use one small portion of.
Why?
Great software - Linux - is not paid, and it is taking over the hosting world, and the IOT world.
GNU is great software. nano / pico is great software. python is great software. .NET is great software. it is all open source.
I'd be curious to see a survey of founders of FOSS and hear their take.
That is one hell of a hot take. RedHat, SUSE, Canonical, would all probably disagree. (also, fwiw, so would I - I have been working on Open Source software for 5+ years, and have been paid for it for the entire time)
> as most are either contract workers or just volunteers
The linux kernel called, said something about having a large amount of fully paid, long term staff.
I get it, you don't like free software - but there is plenty of free software that people are paid to maintain and develop, and it has been a great benefit to software development as a result. Even paid for software is probably using some open source components, (runtimes, languages, compilers, libraries to name a few of them).
Programs should strive to be simple and focus on doing one thing, not try to be Swiss Army Knives to justify their price.