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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

The Play store is a cesspool of dodgy apps with even dodgier advertising and permission practices.

8 out of 10 games I download have this weird splash screen pop up advertising another game or trying to peddle me something.

It's gotten to the point where I don't even download any apps anymore. Too much crap out there and these practices seem completely legal according to Google TOS.

Is it so hard to just pay 5$ for a game, and leave me the fuck alone? Why do devs bombard me with upsells every loading screen after every level?

I haven't used an iOS product for about 3 years, but I don't remember it ever having this particular problem.

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> Is it so hard to just pay 5$ for a game, and leave me the fuck alone?

Yes, actually, it is. It's clearly a lot hard than you realize.

> Why do devs bombard me with upsells every loading screen after every level?

They want to get paid. Not specific to your description, but they are optimizing to get the most money from their players.

> I haven't used an iOS product for about 3 years, but I don't remember it ever having this particular problem.

Making you aware of IAP? They do. PvZ2 has this. It's constantly making you aware that IAPs are right there, quick and easy to purchase, throughout the game. And it does feel like every new level had some in-game way of sharing this information with you.

When using Apps, developers are upselling premium features everywhere and nobody cares. If that same principle is applied to games (which can still be played for free) people start to complain while its essentially the same thing.

It still happens in the iOS world. I bought RAD Soldiers and it hounds me via notification to play it every few days. No way to disable it except to disable all notifications from the game completely.

Did you buy it? I checked and it's free now, but maybe it wasn't before.

If you really did pay money for it, there's no excuse for it to annoy you in that way.

Three years in the mobile space is roughly equal to fifty years anywhere else. The experience on iOS has changes a lot in that time and is just as awful.

Freemium type games are all the rage on both iOS and Android -- there is no difference there (I remember the nonsense when the Dead Trigger publishers went freemium on Android, claiming that enormous piracy force their hand. A week later they quietly went freemium on iOS as well. Their real reason is that getting suckers to buy ammo packs turns out to be much more lucrative).

Is it so hard to just pay 5$ for a game, and leave me the fuck alone? Why do devs bombard me with upsells every loading screen after every level?

What game did you pay $5 for? Examples? Most people refuse to pay $1.99, much less $0.99, leading to the current situation. Again, this is the same on both platforms.

I own a child game company, thus we avoid.IAP.

We have in total, summing iOS and Android, about 500.000 downloads, but only about 2000 was paid... So far this is not much profitable.

So it's all free to download, then ads?

I'd argue most people would be right in not wanting to pay $0.99 for most apps. Most (the vast majority) turn out to be incomprehensibly bad, and I truly feel bad for paying for some.

IMO what we really need is a short, free (optional) trial period for many apps. You really really need to get past the "but what if it's shit?" perfectly-rational reflex when someone sees a non-free app.

There is a short, free mandatory trial period on every app in the play store.

The first time you purchase an app you have 15 minutes, during which time you can go back to the store and hit "refund" to reverse the charge and uninstall the app.

Yes, but 15 minutes is not enough time for me to evaluate an app. 48 hours would be nice. Best of all would be if the store allowed the app developer to specify how long refunds were permitted for (and displayed that information at purchase time). I think the better developers would compete to offer their customers flexibility, confident that their products would prove their worth.

I might be alone, but I think I'd refund every app I purchased if I could within 48 hours. Even 24 would be too short for me.

I'd be able to pick up new games every week for my weekly commute and never have to pay for them.

So you use most of your games for less than 48 hours each? I'd say you're getting very little use out of them! But that's why I'd actually prefer that the developer got to choose the length of time that refunds were allowed. Then the person selling the quick game with a 20 min play time could allow only 5 min for refunds, while the to-do list application could have several weeks.

Windows Phone has this option. Apps have a 'Try' and 'Buy' option. Using 'Try' gets you some form of free trial and users can then upgrade to 'Buy'. This avoids the need to have 'Free' and 'Paid' versions of apps.

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