This was true a decade ago but now most apps interface with some external server, even if it’s not hosted by the developer. The rest of the world keeps changing even if you don’t; API versions increase with breaking changes or a service your app relies on gets shutdown, and now your app is broken. Not upgrading is a boring solution anyway. Keeping up-to-date with new features is what makes computers fun.

This is not my experience. Most apps I paid once for several years ago are either no longer around or now broken.

There are a lot of abusive predatory subscription apps on the App Store that give subscriptions a bad name but what you’re saying is true. The time and effort to make a good quality app is very high and people expect continuous development, compatibility with the latest OS updates, and adoption of new features. It is simply not sustainable for a developer to be left with years of maintenance after selling an app for a few dollars one time. This is compounded as most app sales happen in the first few weeks of an apps release and then drop off to close to zero for the rest of the apps life.

Many of my favourite apps that only charged a few dollars for life access have been abandoned. I would have much preferred to pay a few dollars once per year and still have those great apps. Unfortunately, it seems few apps take this approach, usually subscriptions are unjustifiably high, sometimes obscenely, for the value the app delivers.

There’s some negativity about the price due to it being much higher than usual for a mobile platform. But I hope that it does well. Despite having good hardware games on iOS, iPad OS and TV OS are really lacking in quality. If this game shows there is a viable market for AAA games then that could change.

It was mostly tongue-in-cheek. But I was basing it off 500 charge cycles which is what the iPhone battery is rated for. I just checked and the Apple Watch battery is rated for 1000 cycles so that’s about three years. I’m impressed that your watch battery is still lasting a day, do you use sleep tracking? And do you think your Apple Watch would still last a day if you did 45 minutes of outdoor activity using GPS?

Making it even less economical to replace the battery doesn’t sound very green. Although I guess you can sleep soundly knowing the electricity the Apple Watch used in its short two years of life has been carbon offset. And, in fairness to apple, I’m pretty sure battery replacement involves tossing, I mean recycling, the main unit and giving you a new one.

Thanks for the great work! According to Christian the revenue received by reddit per user per year was $1.50 (optimistically). I just set up a donation on liberapay of $15 per year with the idea that if 10% of Lemmy users donate $15 per year then Lemmy will receive the same income per user as Reddit.