How to Flip an App for Profit
Background used to be a good app. You can tell from its early reviews that its users genuinely enjoyed browsing and making use of its hand-curated selection of iPhone wallpapers. In fact, its reviews are generally positive up until late June, when an update began causing some issues. From that point on it becomes clear that Background is no longer owned or updated by its original developer. It’s been flipped.
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The gold standard seems to be a 3-day trial that moves into a $9.99/week subscription, but there’s flexibility here, depending on precisely how evil you want to be. Make sure to hide these new payment options from your pre-acquisition users. After all, you don’t want them updating their glowing past reviews. Oh, and for those new users you’re about to acquire? Make sure it’s darn near impossible for them to find the “x” to close your subscription view (or, for fun, make it completely nonfunctional!).
At this point we must believe they aren’t willing to make the hard judgement call of scam vs not. Which, I should point out, is the entire point of a walled garden. There’s just no other explanation.
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What violation?
Hint: they are violating none except for overcharging 1,000x
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It’s apple’s fault, but they are technically within the (bad) rules.
In an ironic twist Android is not walked yet the Play Store allows you to report apps and Google actively takes action against offending apps. It even has bug bounties to find misbehaving apps do they can be dealt with.
Previously:
- Predatory iOS App Subscriptions
- How to Game the App Store
- Apple Pulling High-Grossing Scammy Subscription Apps Off the App Store
- Weather Alarms Scam
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
I wonder what percentage of Apple’s bourgeoning service revenue comes from their 30% cut of scam apps.
I hate the subscription model, as every developer hated and bitched when adobe changed it payment model to a subscription for all its creative tools to creative cloud and stoped upgrading the pay-once versions of its tools.
First they protested and then they copy and try to sell how virtuous is the subscription model for clients, hypocrites. The worst thing they are developing for a platform macOS and iOS that doesn’t charge for their OS upgrades or developing tools (that has been the norm in another platform).
Here goes my pledge “I rather die than buy any app on a subscription pricing model, other than newspaper, magazines, adobe apps and Microsoft apps and tv and music subscriptions.”