Apps are also, for the most part, dirt cheap; but what on the face if it appears to be a boon for the consumer is also an increasingly big problem. On iOS, we’ve since the birth of the App Store seen a race to the bottom, with apps starting life cheap and then fighting each other to be cheapest. The App Store doesn’t offer any kind of update-pricing mechanism, and so most devs just got on with offering free minor and major updates to anyone who’d already bought their product, eventually realising they were doing an awful lot of work for no income. More recently, Apple decided to make its iLife and iWork apps entirely free to anyone buying a new device, further eroding the value of software.
Over in camp Google, software hasn’t fared any better. Off the back of yelling OPEN and FREE until its lungs burst, Google has trained Android users to expect to pay little or nothing for apps. The expectation is everything should be free, and the level of entitlement across both platforms is now immense. Developers are criticised for ripping off consumers when they have the audacity to charge even a little money for an app or game they’ve been crafting for months.
On the iPhone, this came to a head with iOS 7. Apple’s overhaul was the most major to date, boasting an entirely new design language. Existing apps suddenly looked old and felt ‘heavy’, and so developers understandably clamoured to get out updates they’d worked crazily hard on. Because Apple’s App Store doesn’t enable them to charge for those updates, many developers resorted to simply uploading entirely new apps instead, and these — horror of horrors — cost money.