Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

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>Well pretty much all the successful apps have decided to shut down but perhaps you know something they don’t and you can profit from their ignorance.

I won't profit because I don't have an app. But all the other third party apps that won't shut down will just start charging and power users will pay for them, because they are better than the official website and app.

>Here’s Apollos developers thoughts:

The thoughts are fundamentally flawed. They're saying their owe existing users a service and can't charge them more for using the app. But... they're suggesting they will just refund them anyway. So, why can't they refund all users that are paying for Apollo and then reintroduce a subscription model. Those 50,000 that paid for Apollo beforehand will most likely renew their subscription that covers the Reddit API charges and nothing changes.

I don’t think any app store or payment provider would look fondly on a process that refunds that many transactions just because you want to turn around and double/triple the price. Credit card companies/payment gateways hate mass refunds and normally it could be cause to terminate your contract. To refund people because the app was forced to go out of business is one thing, but if you want to implement a price increase the supported way is what the developer said: to announce it in advance for next renewal.

Probably what you’d have to do is close the current app and publish a new app with the new business model (subscriber-only at a higher price). The amount of people who would move to such app would only be a tiny fraction of the previous userbase (as most app users were free before), and now you keep having to deal with this chaotic company who could just change the rules again at any time with little/no notice. Plus you’ll never get the kind of reach you had before without the freemium model. I think most indie devs would likely choose to just quit and move on with their lives. If someone wants to buy his code from him and publish their own subscriber-only app, probably it’s an option.

The App Store doesn’t allow for mass refunds like this, you have to ask Apple and they only grant it in special circumstances such as the third party Twitter clients.

I do not see them approving a mass refund just for a price increase.

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