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Comment by zer8k | Hacker News Reader

I agree. SaaS was supposed to be a model that was highly beneficial for vendors selling to corporations. Once it penetrated the consumer market it became death by 1,000 cuts. Now everyone's life is loaded down subscriptions for things that 20 years ago would've been bought once. I miss the days of owning software. I guess I can be thankful it pushed me towards open source.

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Ye. On my phone I used some half-bad text editor, Acode, to view a patch I meeded to review on the fly. It shows ads and does an ad popup when you try to exit.

Like, Google does not let you search their app store and filter by cost or spyware. It is hopeless to find some good utility tool without knowing its exact name.

A simple text-editor should be free. I don't want to give some dev reccuring revenue to unlock Notepad level features.

Try f droid store, all the apps there are required to be open source so there's fewer spy/malware. Or look for apps by secuso on the play store. Fwiw acode on f-droid doesn't seem to have ads.

I strongly agree it shouldn't be this hard to find simple stuff.

>Like, Google does not let you search their app store and filter by cost or spyware

Why would they? But Aurora Store does: https://auroraoss.com/

Saas is also a way of combating piracy imo.

It is, with the downside that if the company goes out of business, the buyer is out of luck. See, e.g. VanMoof

Saas in hardware is kinda stupid if you cannot offer some real benefits eg game pass.

Playstation Plus with the streaming package really changed my view on gaming once I got fiber optic piped into my building. The hardware fan doesn't spin up when I stream Ghosts of Tsushima instead of playing locally, essentially turning my PS4 into a thin client for Sony's services.

RIP Gamestop

It also greatly exacerbates piracy. I'd be willing to bet movies, music, and certain software like CAD are seeing unprecedented levels of piracy after SaaS. Especially when SaaS enables companies like Netflix to betray their consumers.

Professional-level ‘CAD’ has always been susceptible to piracy as it has always been criminally expensive. Music services are at about the right price, and if anything offer pretty good value when one considers that album prices were reaching the $20 mark.

At least on Apple systems, I have always found paid good apps at fair prices for all my needs.

Sadly, though, we’re starting to see a lot fewer Mac-assed apps[1] these days.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a...

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