404
I’m tired of ‘free’ apps that are just trying to bully me into paying
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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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 or call the number on the shareware screen. 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.
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.
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.