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Comment by rgovostes | Hacker News Reader

This makes no difference, because I can’t remember the last time I installed an app other than for the occasional airline.

From 2008-12 it was genuinely exciting to see what new apps were being released every day. Mobile games from that era had cultural impact. I bought $2 apps without a thought.

But Apple incentivized monetization above all else and killed that excitement. Now you can’t find a tip calculator that doesn’t charge a monthly subscription. A popular flight tracker is $60/year (or a $300 purchase). A flash card app costs the same. Apple’s curated list of “essential utilities” includes a birthday countdown that costs $5/wk.

I know every app will cost me hundreds over the span of just a few years for marginal utility so I simply stopped buying them. And I wonder if Apple’s push for more ad revenue is a symptom of that trend.

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The same thing is happening on the Android side.

If you've made a game, it doesn't matter how high quality it is, how many awards it has won, etc.

The only thing that matters is that it's live service, that it doesn't "have an end", that it can drive engagement and perpetual revenue.

Quite a few testimonies from game devs: according to them, Google representatives pretty much told them this.

See also: the requirements to constantly update your app/game even if it's a "finished product" that does not inherently require any updates.

I see a parallel to how Google search created incentives for SEO and social network feeds created incentive for attention grabbing slop. Platforms optimizing for their own interest at the expense of both upstream and downstream.

Is there any platform that does not use these dark patterns? I hope the agent era will allow users to bypass the crappy search responses and slop on feeds. But by the looks of it OpenAI is moving in the same conflict of interest direction to its users.

Of course they are. It was obvious from day one that ads were going to be shoved in. At first they’ll be obvious and clearly separated, then they’ll influence the responses you get without you even knowing. I can’t fathom why anyone ever believed that wouldn’t be the case.

Not a full platform, but F-Droid is the only app-store I know that feels customer first and isn't predatory.

Yeah, I miss those days, I would actively browse the "Top 50" of the different categories and find cool new stuff (especially games). I really miss that time period of when I got the 3GS and this stuff was all new and _actually good_. Since then, more and more cool apps and games have come out, but everything around those has become crappier and more exploitative, and far less pleasant to use :\

> that costs $5/wk

Allowing weekly subscriptions is so comically evil.

It only exists to trick people into overpaying since 99.99% of subscriptions are priced on a monthly basis, so hopefully you don't notice that it says "wk" instead of "mo".

> This makes no difference, because I can’t remember the last time I installed an app

consumer manipulation en masse does impact you even if YOU don't fall for it.

yep. if it didn't work they wouldn't implement it

We are a dying breed.

A whole new generation has never known an App Store without ads.

To them this is the norm.

The time that an “App Store” existed and didn’t have adverts was very minimal. Like OP I haven’t browsed the iPhone App Store for over a decade. Occasionally a web page will send me to their app directly and if I want it (very rare) I’ll get it, same with installing specific apps - Spotify, YouTube, WhatsApp etc.

Apple used to charge money for a premium product where the customers were customers and not the product. It’s moving away from that.

> The time that an “App Store” existed and didn’t have adverts was very minimal.

The iOS App Store was introduced in 2008. Ads in it began in 2016. We’re in 2026. The App Store has had ads for longer than it didn’t, but the early period was not “very minimal”, it was almost half its current life time.

Did ads on search appear in 2016? I vaguely remember the change to the “curated” pages with ads but I thought searching for a specific app and getting an ad for it (or something else) before the first search result was even newer.

> Did ads on search appear in 2016?

Yes.

https://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/06/ads-appearing-app-store...

https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/6/13184346/apple-app-store-...

Wow, last decade went by fast.

But the time from smart phones becoming more popular than normal phones was about 2012, so that would be 75% of the time for most users.

That cutoff doesn’t matter at all for the reality of the situation, and your math is off. The moment smart phone use becomes a majority does not mean the majority of people have only started experiencing something at that point. And we’re talking specifically about the iOS App Store ads, and you’re ignoring the iPod Touch and iPad…

Subscriptions changed the psychology completely. Even when an app is objectively good, you're forced to evaluate it like a service contract

It’s because no one bothers with pay once apps anymore the only way to get customers is free app and tricking them into a subscription. Entire system raced the price people would pay for iOS software to 0

I’m building a pay-once app, but as mentioned in another comment, the business advisors don’t believe in that model.

Since I’m unemployed, I need them to approve my financial plan, and they’re really pressuring me into a subscription model. It’s crazy how many spreadsheet folk don’t think of anything but recurring revenue with a captive customer base.

Yep. I wish they would just completely get rid of the concept of a self-serve App Store and go fully into the video game console model where there’s a much smaller library of much more strongly vetted third party software available. It would drastically increase the average user’s experience with iPhone software quality, and it might even help them with all the complaints about not allowing side loaded apps (notice how video game consoles rarely seem to deal with that complaint).

I agree, and my experience is the same as yours. However…

> This makes no difference

It makes no difference to us personally, but it does make a large difference to other people, many of whom may be friends and/or family we support. And it is another step in the shit road Apple is walking on, which will continue to affect us.

I get where you're coming from and your examples are egregiously expensive, but do we really want to live in a world where software is valued at a $2 one-time payment? We shouldn't be engaging in a race to the bottom like that.

I have a few app subscriptions that are under $5/yr, like Parcel, and always purchase the latest release of Acorn for around $20/yr. I use those apps frequently and hope those rates are supporting the independent developers who make them. I would gladly pay more for tools I use to make a living.

A few other apps that are only occasionally used support short-term paid activations, like Flighty and Oceanic+. I think that's a respectable business model, too.

On the less-reasonable end of the spectrum though are the $10/mo apps. Apple used to charge that much for the entire operating system.

I am pretty sure that if I tried to load up my phone with a handful of the kinds of apps I used to use (a word game, a third-party Twitter client, an SSH terminal, a calculator or to-do app with a trendy minimalist design) I would easily cross $100/mo for some marginally-useful features.

Well, in this present world where it isn't valued at a one-time payment, OP is no longer a customer. Myself as well. Likewise probably a lot of people on HN. Like OP, I don't scroll through the app store anymore. I used to actually do that for fun! So the developer of that would be $2 app is getting nothing today. They release their app and get no one downloading it because it is comingled with the bullshit. Best they can hope for is a 6 year old steals their parents CC and signs them up for a recurring subscription they miss between the rest of their bills. This is the world we live in instead of the $2 software world.

No, but I want to live in a world where software can be 'done.' With very occasional security updates perhaps. I don't want to justify why my pomodoro timer needs a subscription model with constant updates.

Except that in that world they cannot force apps to adopt new APIs and have to keep supporting the old ones, thus the forced upgrades.

Apple does keep supporting old APIs indefinitely.

No it doesn't, do you need examples?

I can give you examples. Just the other day I was updating an API that has been deprecated for a decade and a half but still worked. I never had to update a deprecated API in macOS, though I do. Maybe I got lucky in the ones I use, but either way the point stands.

Try to use Quicktime, Quicktime3D, QuicktimeVR on Tahoe, with their Mac OS 9 API surface.

Or Java Bridge, Carbon, AGL for some more recent on OS X timeframe.

An example on Github compiling on Tahoe is welcomed.

Nope, "Apple does keep supporting old APIs indefinitely.". doesn't stand.

> with their Mac OS 9 API surface

Oh, come on, that’s just bad faith arguing. “Indefinitely” does not mean “forever”. When an API stops working because the OS around it fundamentally changes, that‘s understandable. But they don’t usually break something they deprecated just because it was deprecated, those keep working.

> An example on Github compiling on Tahoe is welcomed.

Sure, buddy, I’ll get right on it. I’ve been avoiding Tahoe since it was announced but I’ll install it and create a project just for a random troll on the internet. I’ll even make a series of them, and a private YouTube channel just for you while I’m at it.

You are free to pick one from my OS X examples, after all they are supposed to be working and supported by Apple in recent versions, as per your wording.

A sample for Sequoia will do as well.

Apple is not good with backwards compatibility to my knowledge. If you buy a 'done' app it's basically a subscription (albeit much cheaper) for maybe 2-3 years because a yearly iOS update will most likely introduce breaking changes, as someone below me already outlined.

It’s still cheaper to buy the same $2, hell, $20 app again once the compatibility breaks than keeping all the subscriptions going on forever.

> This makes no difference

Every step in the wrong direction makes a difference, and IMO it makes sense to keep saying that it's wrong. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "oh well, we're fucked anyways" doesn't help either.

No one likes it that you can't distinguish an ad from an organic result. Regulation to make ads more visually distinct would be widely welcomed. It can be done, why the hopelessness?

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