First Party Apple Apps are “Sherlocking” Subscriptions
After Apple stopped running the “I’m a Mac” ads, about the same time as iOS and its App Store has become the bread and butter of the Californian company, first party apps became stagnant. It was a running joke that iPad didn’t have a calculator app for fourteen years since its release. And frankly, the ecosystem and the mindset of the iOS (and iPadOS) users are quite different from what OS X had promised previously — we are paying for system critical apps that should’ve been released as first party. Indeed, it is no surprise in such circumstances that Apple is inadvertently “Sherlocking” an app by introducing a feature that somehow didn’t make it into a device already.
Take for example, 1Password. I’ve been a big proponent of the Canadian password manager app, but in recent years, I often question myself if recommending 1Password is the buy-and-forget solution. The idea of “vault” in 1Password was enticing enough when it first came out, saving passwords, credentials, IDs, and even notes, and later the software became a cloud service with a subscription. And the line the Apple is drawing, the bare minimum to be a free password manager app, is quite high up there, somewhere near 1Password. Some of the online discussions mentioned Apple Passwords may be able to compete against 1Password, should Apple ever manages to add additional features. This raises an alarming issue for the popular password manager app: what does it do differently in terms of managing password?
The other example, which I would probably do more thorough write-up on as well, is OmniFocus, which currently sits at version 4. For the life of me, I do not understand why OmniFocus still hasn’t figured out syncing with other devices. When I’m working with multiple devices, I have to double-check if OmniFocus is up-to-date before I can start marking items off and get to work. What exacerbates this problem, in my view, is its awkward positioning between supporting Javascript for APIs and Shortcuts. OmniFocus has introduced the whole list of new actions for Shortcuts that are supposedly “new” and deprecated old ones as legacy. It’s one thing to force users to update their custom shortcuts, but it’s something else when the equivalent counterpart is marked with “THIS ACTION IS IN BETA”. Whereas, much like the case with 1Password and Passwords app from Apple, Reminders app are catching up quickly, despite its obvious lack of GTD method.
My first downsizing from subscriptions was actually Microsoft 365. I don’t rely on Microsoft Word to write. I’m the generation that has been told ‘type on computers, not write’, as in, all the extra features from the word processor were treated as bells and whistles on a glorified electric typewriter. No doubt there are professionals who can’t live without the tools Microsoft has been horning last three decades and more, but that’s simply not me — I prefer to rely on writing apps to do “writing”. Currently, a lot of the tasks that needed Word or Excel, I use Google Docs or iWork. That’s one less $99.99 per year subscription.
Ultimately, subscriptions have to make its own appeal on regular basis. The price tag attached to annual or monthly subscriptions go both ways: a reliable income for the developers, but also a moment of weakness in their user base. The apps sold under one-time payment had a rudimentary lock-in effect, where users would be more hesitant to consider alternatives and stay with already paid, yet outdated, version. Under current economy of subscriptions, users don’t lapse subscriptions; we jump to another product, be it may open-sourced, first party, freemium, or all of the above. There is something to be said about subscription-based apps that suffers to compete against free alternatives.