3.0's Missing Trialware Business Model
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One of most talked about features from the upcoming iPhone 3.0 release is In-App Purchases. The examples from 3.0 preview event illustrate its use: game developers can sell additional levels, city guides can sell new locations, and e-book readers can purchase new paid content.
These are all obvious wins for iPhone app developers, though it has been pointed out that it could be a disaster for users.
Apple’s SVP of iPhone Software, Scott Forestall, cited wanting to support other business models as the motivation for creating In-App Purchase. There is, however, one business model that Apple chose not to support. Quoting Engadet’s coverage, Forestall said:
“This is for paid apps only… Free apps remain free.”
In Apple, please support iPhone trial apps, David Sinclair points out that the choice to limit In-App Purchase to paid-apps means that there is still no “trialware” option, short of the clunky “lite” app method already employed.
David’s article weighs the potential user confusion of pay-within-free apps to the complexity associated upgrading from a lite app to its full-strength counterpart, including downloading the full app, reconfiguring the app, sandbox induced difficulty transferring user data, etc.
David has issued a call-to-action to ask Apple to support a trialware model by filing a bug report duplicating his. Be sure to reference his bug by include using this internal Apple identifier: rdar://problem/6699761.
“Disaster for users”? Well they’re not taking anything away, so it’s hard to argue for that. It’s still a net win overall.
The 99 cent trial, a variation on the Shareware model? That could work for the more expensive (or premium) apps, combined with good reviews and a good supporting web site with screen casts and the like.
Hopefully user reviews will stifle dishonest use of the Store Kit.
Also missing is the paid update. Currently your choices are to give users free updates or to create a totally separate SKU and charge them full price. I’d love to be able to give users a discount on major upgrades.
You know, this reminds me of when I was a teen and shareware still had various business models. One that I really loved was the computer club model. I used to pay $15 a month to get biweekly or monthly shipments of the latest shareware directly to my house (this was pre-internet mind you). I found a ton of gems in the midst of of things that didn’t play well. I would keep the good (and eventually purchase the really good) and throw out the others. I passed on the disks to my friends and all was well.
Now fast forward to the internet days and the iPhone. On the customer side we have a horrendous mess of free apps with virtually no way to sort them, and you to search to find anything decent. Then there are the app screen maintenance issues. If you do actually install all of your apps you’ll have pages on your iPhone to try and find these. Then the duplicate application issue mentioned above between light and full applications.
This brings me to a possible solution. We need an application that acts as the trialware provider, publisher, or distributor. It could cost $0.99 and then download trialware inside of it for free. You could also have apps like this as clubs that use the subscription model. Using that model we could see a lot of saas apps, trialware or otherwise.
This really could be a boon to applications. Suddenly you can do mmorps on the iPhone on a subscription basis. Each month the app downloads a unique key which validates that the user has paid for the month. The key is what would actually be paid for here.
This has so many obvious benefits that I can’t see how a person can’t find a place for trialware somewhere in there. I think that this is the birth of a new business model for trialware – one that helps the customer become more comfortable with their choices, and more easily be able to handle application launches, searches, updates, and deletions. This is fabulous for trialware.
@greg Based on the announcement, I think you could do a free update to a paid app, that then offers some optional “Pro” features for a fee. Not quite the same, but almost.
@m3talsmith Some interesting ideas… on a smaller scale, a single company selling a multi-game pack could split it up this way, with updates to add new mini-games housed within a single app. I don’t know how well it would work on a larger, multi-company scale, both technically and within Apple’s license.
In any case, we should certainly see a lot of interesting models.
you can’t download executable code and execute it or provide an alternate source of apps – strictly prohibited by the apple dev membership agreement.