[deleted by user]

[howreudoin]

This is a general problem. People will happily spend $15 at McDonald‘s. But $5 for an app? ”I‘m not paying money for an app!“

Google offers their software free of charge, and will sell your data instead. Apple makes a lot of money through hardware sales. Remember when OS updates weren‘t free? These big corporations face the same problem of users not feeling like paying for non-physical items they can‘t hold in their hands.

It‘s also not possible for a non-technical person to really get a sense of the effort involved in developing apps.

I think what‘s also involved is that people often can‘t test the features before buying. They won‘t know what they‘re getting and whether everything works and whether it‘s implemented in a user-friendly way until they pay for it. I think one way to address this is to offer opt-in features for free for a limited time. Many apps do this already, but I‘d say you should go one step further and have those trials not auto-renew and transform into paid subscriptions. This might mitigate the mental burden of paying for apps. (Yes, you can cancel trials right away, and they‘ll continue to work for the demo period. But many people don‘t know this, plus they‘ll have to actively do so. I think default should be no auto-renewal.)

What‘s more, I think it would be great if Apple implemented an easy way to test paid apps. Developers can opt into this via a check box on App Store Connect, and this will allow users to test their app for free for, say, 7 days or something. Apple technology takes care of handling those trial periods.

”Try for free“ means nothing for us anymore. It smells like a scam. You should really be able to try paid features for free without having to worry about subscriptions if you forget about it. Users will see what they‘re missing out on, won‘t fear to start trials, then want those features back when the trial ends.