There are a few more stumbling blocks to purchase as well:
- What of my billing information / what billing hassles am I opening myself up for? Considering that app purchases are frequently tied to both credit cards and your comms/telco vendor (and often other integrated services), you're putting a lot at risk.
- What respect (or lack) does this app have for my privacy? I'm very conscious of what closed-source resources I use, and even the fact that every time I'm inputting a PIN on a purchase screen (rarely, preferring cash) I'm opening myself to identity theft / fraud risk.
- What effect is this app going to have on my device stability/integrity? Again, phones, tablets, and laptops are complex devices with extensive user state. Losing this is a real PITA.
- What learning investment must I make for this tool? Will it be worth it?
Coffee, or food, or other concrete, discrete, simple, tangible goods offer a vastly simpler experience and generally (food poisoning aside) pretty minimal downside risk potential.
To throw in a contrasting physical-goods analogy: I'm adverse to trying out new wines. Why?
- I'm very aware that much of the perceived difference in wines is highly subjective, and largely market-driven.
- I don't get all that much from the experience myself. Really, Two Buck Chuck is pretty decent, though there are a few others I occasionally buy.
- The unit-cost is relatively expensive compared with alternatives (forgoing consumption, cheaper sufficing alternatives) -- $15-$25 for a moderately priced bottle, and up into the tens or hundreds if you like.
- Option overload. Too many brands and varieties, far more than I can keep track of. Even if I find something I like, odds are I'm not going to remember what it was next time I'm shopping (not just conjecture, this happens routinely).
- And a bad choice can be ... if not toxic, just really unappealing.
Upshot: I'm not swayed by the hype, I'm risk averse, the good is expensive for the utility provided. I purchase rarely, and conservatively when I do so.
I viewed the one-off small app market for PCs as pretty limiting, in the 1990s and 2000s. I see the market for PDA / mobile apps as similarly limiting.
On the computer side, Free Software utilities and a modicum of scripting / application engineering provide me with virtually all of my needs. In large part because the FS utilities aren't silos, but (often) nodes on a processing pipeline. The extensibility tools aren't yet present on mobile, though Free Software is beginning to make inroads.
While I don't think it will eliminate the paid app market, and for a large portion of the population may not (as was the case with the PC market), I suspect FS will supplant a fairly large share of paid-app opportunities. Perhaps moreso than in the PC market of the past couple of decades as FS has garnered far wider acceptance (it was freaky even in the late 1990s, it's mainstream today).
Yes, the point here: the actual non-monetary "cost" of a purchase to many end users is much higher than 99c. I would say personally that the cost of any app I have to purchase is $2-3 at least. Therefore all that pricing the app at 99c has done is brought the cost down to the floor imposed by other factors.
So app developers need to judge and price their apps comensurate with the real "effective" cost the user is going to pay anyway to install their app. Pricing less than that, or at least deluding yourself that pricing less than that gives you a competitive advantage, is pointless and sometimes counterproductive (in the absence of other information I will judge the quality of your app partly by how it is priced).
You're understating the personal cost of a purchase by a couple of orders of magnitude. How much time does it take for you to make an assessment of product quality? What's the cost of your time? What are the available alternatives (where "failure to purchase" is in fact an option, and the default mode)?
- What of my billing information / what billing hassles am I opening myself up for? Considering that app purchases are frequently tied to both credit cards and your comms/telco vendor (and often other integrated services), you're putting a lot at risk.
- What respect (or lack) does this app have for my privacy? I'm very conscious of what closed-source resources I use, and even the fact that every time I'm inputting a PIN on a purchase screen (rarely, preferring cash) I'm opening myself to identity theft / fraud risk.
- What effect is this app going to have on my device stability/integrity? Again, phones, tablets, and laptops are complex devices with extensive user state. Losing this is a real PITA.
- What learning investment must I make for this tool? Will it be worth it?
Coffee, or food, or other concrete, discrete, simple, tangible goods offer a vastly simpler experience and generally (food poisoning aside) pretty minimal downside risk potential.
To throw in a contrasting physical-goods analogy: I'm adverse to trying out new wines. Why?
- I'm very aware that much of the perceived difference in wines is highly subjective, and largely market-driven.
- I don't get all that much from the experience myself. Really, Two Buck Chuck is pretty decent, though there are a few others I occasionally buy.
- The unit-cost is relatively expensive compared with alternatives (forgoing consumption, cheaper sufficing alternatives) -- $15-$25 for a moderately priced bottle, and up into the tens or hundreds if you like.
- Option overload. Too many brands and varieties, far more than I can keep track of. Even if I find something I like, odds are I'm not going to remember what it was next time I'm shopping (not just conjecture, this happens routinely).
- And a bad choice can be ... if not toxic, just really unappealing.
Upshot: I'm not swayed by the hype, I'm risk averse, the good is expensive for the utility provided. I purchase rarely, and conservatively when I do so.
I viewed the one-off small app market for PCs as pretty limiting, in the 1990s and 2000s. I see the market for PDA / mobile apps as similarly limiting.
On the computer side, Free Software utilities and a modicum of scripting / application engineering provide me with virtually all of my needs. In large part because the FS utilities aren't silos, but (often) nodes on a processing pipeline. The extensibility tools aren't yet present on mobile, though Free Software is beginning to make inroads.
While I don't think it will eliminate the paid app market, and for a large portion of the population may not (as was the case with the PC market), I suspect FS will supplant a fairly large share of paid-app opportunities. Perhaps moreso than in the PC market of the past couple of decades as FS has garnered far wider acceptance (it was freaky even in the late 1990s, it's mainstream today).
Edit: wine analog.