Okay, but what is the solution? I see a lot of whining from consumers about how expensive and enshittified everything is, yet very few people seem to be willing to donate to/pay for the few alternatives that exist. They vote for the same entrenched political parties in their countries (or don’t vote at all). They don’t get involved in activist movements. Why are we expecting the system and/or the outcomes to magically change when all we are willing to contribute is crying on social media?
I have no issue paying for an app. I have an issue with a free app wanting me to pay $5 a month to use it.
Platforms removing bot reviews? I know Google wants every app on their store to be 5 stars, but that’s not good for users. We should all be giving bad apps 1 star reviews to help other users find the good ones.
You can either have 0 of my money forever
Or you can have a reasonable amount of it for lifetime access, at minimum, to the version I purchased
Honestly, these days I use fdroid as my primary app store. It’s been an amazing way to cut through the junk and find great apps.
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Same but with the droidify client. FOSS is life.
I just found out about this interval timer. It works great
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Then don’t use them?
Unpopular opinion: I’m fine with any try before you buy model as long as (1.) it’s clearly stated up front before downloading and also (2.) it allows you to try enough of the app to decide if it does what you want or not
Very little pisses me off like downloading a ‘free’ app and immediately being hit with a paywall for a subscription without so much as a free trial. Those devs can go fuck themselves. Their app is NOT free and should not be marked as such.
Alternatively, shit like what Accuweather did also pisses me off. Years ago, they had a one time payment to remove ads permanently. I paid, because I like their service and didn’t mind kicking a few bucks their way to support development. A few months later, they introduced a sub model that locked many existing features behind a wall and started showing me ads again. I immediately uninstalled that shit, sent them a scathing email (which I recognize does nothing, but made me feel good), and found an alternative.
I would love to have an overview before I install an app what it might cost. Play store lists at least minimum and maximum in-app-purchases, but the information is not very visible and I cannot filter my results based on it. And if need to pay for a subscription on the app website it will not be reflected at all.
Developers should be forced to provide an outline what you get for free (if they decide to advertise/sell their app as free) and what the different payment/subscription tiers include.
It also gives you no clue whether those prices are one-off purchases or monthly subscriptions, making them entirely useless.
$3.99, sounds like a dea… per month… YOU BASTARDS.
What I can’t stand is when platforms don’t take no for an answer.
Every fucking visit to Dropbox: “Upgrade to Standard!”
Every check out on Amazon: "Upgrade to Prime!
Every time I open Walmart: “Upgrade to Walmart+”
I fucking can’t stand it.
Stop shopping at Walmart and Amazon
Would you like to activate this annoying feature!
- Yes.
- Remind me later.
A friend once said that she finds the invasiveness of this legitimately a little triggering, because it so vividly reminds her of the time she spent with an extremely abusive partner, who would similarly restrict her ability to meaningfully say no to something.
Ever since she made this point to me, I realised that I had been thinking of online consent dialogs as being distinct from the general concept of consent that we use in other life contexts (such as sexual consent, medical consent etc.). Since then, I have started to fold the online stuff into the more general notion of consent, which adds a whole bunch of connotations that makes me feel far more icky whenever I see a dialog that doesn’t let you say no.
One time a bunch of people who were important to me complained that I was violating their consent by exposing them to left wing political ideas they didn’t like. It fucked me up
Oh wow, that is pretty fucked up. That sounds similar to what I’ve heard described as “weaponized therapy speak” — where terms from mental health therapy creep into daily vernacular and, divorced from their original context, are misused in a way that causes harm.
The archetypical example of this might be if a person doesn’t remember a past event that their partner is referencing in an argument, they may be accused of “gaslighting”. It’s not always an intentional misuse, but sometimes it is deliberate and maliciously used to manipulate someone. A big example of that is someone making unreasonable and controlling demands of a person, and then getting annoyed if that person doesn’t comply, because they’re “not respecting boundaries”.
I don’t know whether what you describe would count as misusing therapy speak, but I do know that I feel icky about “consent” being used in this way — in addition to being a hurtful way to put you down, this feels like it obfuscates the actual meaning of consent.
Regardless, I’m sorry that happened to you; that really sucks. It must’ve been hard to feel like you weren’t allowed to express your beliefs — politics are pretty pervasive, so even if you’re avoiding actively political discussions, political subtext can seep into regular conversations pretty easily. Having different political beliefs to you was no excuse to shut you down in such a hurtful manner. I hope you have better friends now.
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A ‘free’ app the trys to shove either a sub or purchase is the same annoyance.
To a certain extent I get it though. It’s one of the fundamental failings of the App Store. In the olden days you paid for a piece of software and whatever was on the disc is what you got. When next year’s version came out you had to go to the store and pay for that one too. When the App Store came out all of a sudden Apple and their customers expected devs to keep supporting apps on newer platforms with changing APIs. You can’t develop with no income, so developers turned to subscriptions and similar.
There needs to be a better way but Apple makes money off the way it works now.
Also most people do not want to pay for an app. They simply don’t.
They either don’t mind the ads or just buy a subscription, but don’t even think about spending like 1€ once to never be bothered.
I don’t know why the micro subscription model hasn’t become a thing. I get that even if you do basically no new features on an app it still needs to be updated from time to time as Android changes. So why not have apps be a buck or two a year?
It seems they’re either free, or a $8+ a month. All the fitness apps are insanely priced considering they have very little development and all the data within is crowdsourced. Plus I guarantee they’re selling your health info.
I would have no issue at all subscribing to dozens of apps if they were super cheap. You get a lot of people chipping in $2 and that adds up quick. I’m guessing the reason they don’t is transaction fees and app store cuts.
Every single thing is not subscription today
I’ve only purchased like 3 apps in like 15 years. Every now and then I donate to an open source project. I used to pay for Office, Adobe Cloud, Sony Vegas way back in the day. What happened was the free and open source became far beyond capable than my technical ability and if I needed pay software, it was for work at a company that purchased licenses themselves. It was fast forward in mobile apps. There was already 20 years of open source desktop software being adapted to mobile even if less limited it covered what I and many people would want to do with a mobile device was quickly covered.
Now it’s a matter of getting people to stumble on your software first and get them to pay before they learn of any of the truly free stuff. Cloud services where storage/processing is fully off your device and way better in ways are what can’t be fully replicated as a free service for people. A NAS can work out to be cheaper for storage but way less functional and more hassle for most people
Then uuuuh stop using them?
One of the things the article is complaining about is that many apps look like they are free in the store with an optional subscription, but once you’ve downloaded them you find out basic features are locked behind a subscription.
Personally the worst trend I’ve started seeing is “free” apps that are great for a few days until you find out they’ve been silently giving you a free trial of the premium subscription and now you’ll have to pay up to keep using basic features. They’re hoping now that you’ve spent some time learning and using the app you’re invested enough to start paying to keep using it. You could be getting yourself into one of these apps and not even know it til a week later, it’s infuriating.
Does the store not have an “in-app fees” subtext on the app page?
If an app doesnt have that flag but still uses them, you can report it.
Anyway a lot of these developers get it wrong. Don’t bully people into paying with aggressive or misleading tactics as that just alienates your user base. Instead make the app so good to use that people are willing to pay for extra features. The free version should be so good that people stop and wonder how they can support the dev. Then offer a feature that is genuinely useful.
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Everything is so enshittified now, that we need to redefine the concept of “free”
Good blog post, thanks for sharing. I like the point about companies double dipping by trying to extract both our data and our money; I feel like I’m probably going to use that at some point when I’m on my soapbox and complaining about big tech.
That blog post is AI slop, both text and image
I’m especially tired of websites dressed up to look like the official place to get (insert free program) and are SEOd to show up first and try to extract money from you.
