As expected, it seems that this week is full of anti-consumer practices. Besides the Game Freak stating that not all Pokemon will be transferable in their new games, Twitterrific pulls an anti-consumer practice by forcing a major update and putting ads back in for users. Now, users who payed $7.99 to remove the ads are greeted with ads. To remove them, you have to pay a monthly or yearly subscription or pay $30, which is a 73% increase.
I understand that developers need to make money as development is not free. I’m an iOS and Mac developer for now. I rely on donations and App Store sales to cover development costs. However, there is no excuse to force an update and then put a ransom for users who paid to more money. This anti-consumer practice shows that you only care about money and you are willing to screw over paying customers. Even the excuses the owners said that they won’t be able to notify users to upgrade if they released the new version as a separate app as said in a tweet.
Again, the legacy unsupported app would simply *not* have been left untouched and you’re assuming it would have been. Banners and pop ups added to T5 to direct people to T6 would result in the same user experience that we ended up with – but without any of the new features.
— Sean Heber (@BigZaphod) June 15, 2019
The end result of that approach would have been *worse* than where we ended up. There is no possible way from a “continuing to stay in business” point of view that we could NOT have altered T5 to direct all those people to T6. Stop assuming T5 would have been frozen in time.
— Sean Heber (@BigZaphod) June 15, 2019
This is inexcusable. I have paid two different upgrades for Twitterrific for iOS during their heyday and now they want more. No, I will not accept this slimy business practice. If they don’t want this backlash, they should just release the new version as a separate app. Then put a dismissible one-time notification notifying users there is a new major upgrade. Then, you wouldn’t receive the backlash you are having now and you might have more people willing to pay. As a result of this, I switched my iOS Twitter client to Tweetbot.
Now they pulled this anti-consumer practice, I will be boycotting all applications developed by Iconfactory since they only care about money instead of making paying customers happy. I advise everyone to call them out of this practice as well and boycott their products as well.
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