Apps that shouldn't be Subscriptions
What is the most useless app that you have seen being given as a subscription?
For me, I tried a 'minimalist' launcher app for Android that had a 7 day trial or something and they had a yearly subscription based model for it. I was aghast. I would literally expect the app to blow my mind and do everything one can assume to go that way. In a world, where Nova Launcher (Yes, I know it has been acquired by Branch folks but it still is a sturdy one) or Niagara exist plus many alternatives including minimalist ones on F Droid, the dev must be releasing revolutionary stuff to factor in a subscription service.
Second, is a controversial choice, since it's free tier is quite good and people like it so much. But, Pocketcasts. I checked it's yearly price the other day, and boy, in my country, I can subscribe to Google Play Pass, YouTube Premium and Spotify and still have money left before I hit the ceiling what Pocketcasts is asking for paid upgrade.
Also, what are your views on one time purchase vs subscriptions? Personally, I find it much easier to purchase, if it's good enough even if it was piratable, something if it is a one time purchase rather than repetitive.
A watch face for a smart watch.
This one guy made a really popular Android Wear watch face that mimicked the Pixel lockscreen. It only cost a few bucks, and people loved it. Due to some personal things in his life, he had to sell the app to a new developer to make ends meet. The new developer then started charging something like $7/WEEK subscription for a watchface that he didn't even develop in the first place, and runs entirely locally on the device so it's not like he's maintaining any servers or anything.
Absolutely absurd.
What. If that business model actually works for him, something is wrong with this world.
It's the business model of build or buy trust and then exploit it until you're loaded and your former customers all hate you. But you're loaded.
And yeah, there's something wrong with this world.
It does work. People are distracted and are not reading every message correctly. And payment processing in the appstores is also kind of easy - so you might be able to scam a few people into subscribing and they might not notice this directly. You know that you are not checking your credit card bills in details every month. So you can get a nice revenue stream of unsuspecting customers for a few month until you've burned down every little bit of trust and user base you had
This has to be one of the lamest attempts at getting folks to subscribe. I couldn't have imagined that watch faces could also be subscription based in the first place.
I too ran into an Android Wear watch face that mimicked the Pixel lockscreen. However, it was priced X INR(Indian Rupee) per year in my country and was decently cheap. However, I soon ran into another app, which was a one time purchase, that did what it did mainly(sync and show phone and watch battery on each other) and worked on most lock screens. So the latter was a proper kind of app design amd atleast not subscription hell.