Terry Godier
Apple actually runs two app stores for each platform: a paid one and a free one.
Here’s a story that’s closer to reality than it should be:
You and a friend are building apps. You’ve got the same concept, but disagree on pricing. You want to do an upfront paid app and he wants to do a subscription based app.
You both put in a few months of work and have a v1 concept that feels shippable. Good vibes.
You launch the app. You set a price of $4.99. One-time. Your friend goes with a 7-day trial and $4.99 per year going forward.
Paid apps get no trial period. There’s simply not a way to do it. But in the free store? Your friend has options. He could put a hard paywall in his app, effectively making it paid-only (many do), a soft paywall, an introductory offer, a promotional offer — all sorts of things.
Assuming you’ve built enough of a benefit story for users to buy your app, now it’s time to get paid, and to pay Apple. Subscription apps get an automatic discount on Apple fees for year two+ of the term, dropping from 30% to 15%. One-time purchase apps are only able to get a 15% rate by being part of the Small Business Program, which is a program developers must apply for, and wait for approval by Apple, to enter.
Since you’re a new developer, you applied for the small business program in the same month that you created your developer account and launched your app. Once approved (it takes a little bit) it’ll take effect the following month. Month 1 sales will still be billed at the 30% take rate.
A few months go by and things are going well. You’ve got lots of new features suggested by users and now that you have proven your concept you can invest in some roadmap work.
Apple offers you no mechanism for what is arguably the most natural transaction in software: paying for major upgrades. The only option is to create a new app listing or to use an IAP. There’s a strong disadvantage to creating a new app listing, namely losing your accumulated reviews and visibility. Your buddy creates a monthly plan to go alongside the yearly option. He considers a lifetime purchase as well.
You get your first sales report and notice a handful of refunds. You mention it to your friend and he says oh yeah, don’t you get the notifications? No, you don’t. Well, why are they refunding? You don’t know. Apple does ask users during the Report a Problem process, but they don’t pass that along. His customer requests a refund and he gets a push from Apple within minutes, with the reason attached. He has 12 hours to respond. He submits usage data. He tells Apple whether he thinks the refund should be granted. He finds out the outcome. He has built an entire customer support flow on the back of this API within his app. Your customer requests a refund from a webpage he had to Google and you find a line item in next month’s financial report.
Every missing feature for paid apps has a working equivalent in the IAP world.
Maybe Apple just hasn’t gotten to these features yet, but from where I sit this looks less like a backlog and more like a strategy. Don’t let the word “free” confuse you, there’s still plenty of business to do with a free app. Free means free to download, not free to use, and that’s by design.