Comment by lsllc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lsllc | Hacker News Reader

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Please not more app-store abandonware. I have a decent amount on both my phone and my MBP. Sad to see, I really liked Monodraw for creating ASCII illustrations for source code (e.g. buffer layouts etc).

Of course, probably it'll be ok for a while, but then some App Store API or updated processor requirements will render it unusable like so many others (particularly on iOS).

So now I've got several abandonware apps that I paid for: Things (v1), Quiver, Artboard and now Monodraw. I can't say any of them really had any non-minor updates since I got them certainly not features (yes, I realize Things did a separate V2 app ... but I wasn't happy about that happening so soon after buying V1). I do realize some of this is Apple's fault in the way the store is structured.

Too bad Apple doesn't enact some sort of source-code escrow such that if an app is abandoned, the source gets published, but with owner-copyright retained so no-one can resell -- as part of the T&C of submitting an app. Maybe after 1 year of abandonment for a "big" company and 2 years for indie-dev apps.

*EDIT*: Happy to see Milen's sibling comment about fixing breakage!! I realize you have to make a living -- is there a way to contribute for these new features (or is it a totally new app -- which is fine!).

> EDIT: Happy to see Milen's sibling comment about fixing breakage!! I realize you have to make a living -- is there a way to contribute for these new features (or is it a totally new app -- which is fine!).

I've considered the idea of letting other developers have access to the source code and help with the development. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure a way to make it fair - e.g., if someone starts contributing, do they start receiving a percentage of the proceeds? What's a fair percentage and what about multiple external contributors?

I could never come up with a workable model, so it's either fully open-source or proprietary. As I mentioned in another comment, I believe the way to go is an open data format which allows interoperability. This way there's no lock-in and competing apps (open or closed) can exist.

For what it's worth, the Monodraw data format is not secret, it's just compressed JSON. I haven't documented it because it's more of an implementation detail and I'd rather spend my very limited time on improving the product.

Hope that provides a bit more context.

Thank you for the comment, apologies if I came off a bit antagonistic! It's just a little frustrating when you see really great apps potentially ending.

It's really too bad there's not a better indie-dev model for the App Store, if I am buying an app (I think maybe I maybe paid $19 for Monodraw -- totally worth it btw), am I buying the app as-is? or do I get updates ... if so how long should I expect to get them and are the updates minor fixes or bigger whizbang features.

I can see that once an app gets to a steady state, there's probably diminishing returns in putting a lot of effort into new features esp. if your market is small. On the other hand, if the app has some sort of subscription, now there is an expectation for updates (not unreasonable, but possibly the numbers might not work for the developer).

I think Pixelmoter sort of got this right, although they did release a Pro version separately (which I also bought). However, I suspect they're a much larger company and probably have quite a large market share and can afford to continue to release updates to keep it fresh (and for someone like me, the app is exactly what I need vs. say photoshop and the price point is reasonable).

At this point, the only apps worth using were released 10 years ago, and have all been removed from Play Store. I have to either use my own backups or download sketchy APKs. I'm not exaggerating, today I tried a number of shoddy disk space analyzers full of bloat and ads, until giving up and just using one from 2014... (except it'd been deleted, so I had to do a bit of digging.)

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