Fuckin' Nerd

Angry users

text

marco:

topherchris on this, specifically about how non-free iPhone apps get so many negative reviews in the App Store simply because they’re not free:

People are essentially saying “I severely underestimate the amount of work it took to make this” or “I understand it took many, many hours to make this but I don’t think you should be compensated.”

Exactly. Instapaper is relatively simple on the surface, but it still took at least 100 solid hours of work for the iPhone app alone — and it relies on the website and its complex website-packing and text-parsing features, which took many additional hours to develop and require a $250/month server (with a few hours per month of maintenance).

Or even within iTunes, are the majority of album reviews something like “9.99 for this new Beck album? Rip off! It’s just some notes played in a certain order! $5 at most!” Crazy talk.

(loved that)

My last word on this is a modest proposal to Apple: Only let people who have downloaded and installed any given app write a review of it.

This would help most apps’ reviews tremendously.

This is a product of all the free shit online.  Instapaper costs nothing, so a paid instapaper iPhone would definitely receive ire from the masses. At the same time, people don’t respect other’s work because no one really knows how much work it takes.

I don’t think people would bitch at Beck selling his music, but they might bitch at some unknown band trying to sell their music for a high price.  The majority of iPhone developers are unknowns, so you just look like a monkey trying to make money until you have some sort of reputation.  Then again if Facebook priced their app, they’d probably get a lot of bad reviews too.

There was an article not too long ago about how unsustainable and bad for the market it is for web properties to go the free route and try to monetize later on or through advertising.  This and the download culture has created a generation that wants everything to be high quality and free.

Seems like we’ll have to wait til they grow up and try to do the same thing.  I’m sure they’ll start paying to get what they want.

Reblogged from Marco.org.