Apps Don’t Just Grow On Trees
Napster, Gmail, and The Things People Won’t Pay For Anymore
This evening as I was trying to sit down to work on a blog post, the Medium blog composition engine was acting funny. Most of the artifacts that you see when starting a post, the prompts for hero photo, head, subhead, and body, were all gone. What was left was a blank slate. Ready for my words. But because I didn’t expect to see such a slate, and I didn’t know how to react.
I closed the draft, restarted Chrome, and that didn’t fix it. Tried to start a post in Safari. Same problem. Rebooted the computer, tried both web browers as Medium Clients again. Still, nothing.
I then did as most would, and ran to ask Medium’s support team for help. That’s done by querying @Medium on twitter, or sending an email to yourfriends@medium.com
Soon, I got a response, in the form of this post explaining how the engine had been updated and revised. I replied “thanks, was this extremely recent!?”
The response I got was simply, “These changes went into effect last night. So extremely extremely.”
I replied with my thanks, thinking to myself, App Developers are just like The Rest of Us. For some reason, though, we all expect apps should be free. Most people, according to an unscientific study, refuse to pay for apps. I just think, though, if you’re unwilling to support app developers, by the direct means of paying for the app, I just can’t see your value system.
Maybe you got burned once by an overpriced app, in the heyday. You thought it was the right one, but turned out to be spam, and then and there declared you’d never pay for an app again.
Medium, much like Twitter, and Tumblr, and most of the software we use online every day, is free. That these robust services manage to stay free, with ads on some, is mostly made possible by investors, because nobody values software anymore.
And you can blame both Napster and Google for that. Napster, and file sharing writ large, explained how easy it is to transfer bits of information, devaluing any & all software goods. I don’t mention Google because of how most of the apps in their Google Play are notoriously free. If only the change in question were that recent. We would have had a chance.
It’s more in how Google handled Gmail. By making the best email client in the world (if you can make peace with content skimming) free, Google immediately sent a message to customers that they didn’t need to pay money for anything digital. Unfortunately, people started applying this everywhere. Most of the people out there are willing to sacrifice personal information in order to save a buck.
I hope you will stop the next time an app appears for purchase in the shop, and you see there’s a price tag, you stop for a second and look at the app. Think about the hard work that went into designing it, into creating it, and to supporting it. The staffers who produce these digital tools deserve a more valid business model, and I wish that we wouldn’t depend on in-app-purchases or ad sponsors to survive.
Look at Gmail. Closely. Doesn’t it look like it there’s a lot of money behind the scenes? If it’s not coming from you, remind yourselves that the money is still being made off of you.
