I cannot remember off the top of my head the exact number and am clearly too lazy to google it but there is a specific length of time in which, if no new noises pass through, the human brain processes it as a pause/silence.

I want to say 300ms which would coincide with your 500ms example

All of the ones I come across only extracted the points for action items. I didn’t notice any of them submitting to task managers.

You asked “how they are able to do this” and I said it has been a standard feature for a while now in meeting rooms. The additional features in todoist fills in the right data in the right columns, which is notable, but things like have been done with 30boxes where natural language is used to create events.

how many accounts do you have, my guy?

One way of looking at is that subscription software helps align developer interests with dedicated users. It's easier to retain users than it is to get new users, so developers are incentivized to build features/make improvements for existing users to keep them as happy users. In a pay once upfront model developers are essentially only incentivized to build features that attract new users.

The issue I see is that for certain apps, such as one I am currently working on and hope to publish soon on iOS, is that they do require a lot of maintenance once published even if there were no server costs. Given the amount of work I already put in it and how much more will be necessary even just to keep the app correctly running in the future, I don't really see what other monetization approach would make sense for me. Actually, I would even argue that selling an app without a subscription might (sometimes) be setting wrong or blurry expectations: if a user accepts to pay today a single time, how long are they expecting updates for? Will it only be basic bug fixes or also major new features? With a subscription, I feel like at least if they are unhappy with my app, they won't really have lost anything and can just unsubscribe, since they had basically accepted, IMO, that the money they put in my app each period of time is only for the service and potential updates in that small period of time and not future changes.

A one time cost is fine if you don’t mind the app breaking next time Apple updates iOS. There is an ongoing cost to ensuring the app continues to work.

I have a fully offline app and I offer the users two options (in addition of using a "basic" version for free)

- monthly subscription

- or pay one time fee of ~ 6-month subscription and own it forever

To be honest, in this case the subscription is cheaper for the average user, because most cancel in under six months.

So it's ok to pay for machines but for the humans working on something then no?

there are a lot of apps that do this though… eg. git tower. Sketch. Etc. Not saying that I like it or anything. Maybe its the combination of local first + an app that seems to be trivial (I am sure it was not but if you hear "daily planner" I think its reasonable to assume that its less complex than a git client and/or an app like Sketch).

The developer fee is a business expense for anyone publishing software as an entity on the App Store. This is the same as any other expense someone might require for their profession, it doesn't have anything to do with their financial security.

Sounds good, doesn't work. How would I sell a major version on a store like the Apple or Google app stores [0]? How will I fund my salary as well as my employees' salaries from only major versions, what if people buy now but not later on, do I lay them off? For what it's worth I do offer lifetime plans that are basically 2 to 3 years of the annual plan, as that's the expected lifetime value (LTV) of some of my apps.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45810856#45815972 (this comment gets it right on why you can't do this on said app stores)

There used to be a lot less expectation of post-sale maintenance of consumer software in the era where sales rather than subscriptions were the norm. There was also tolerance for higher up-front prices, and for much of that period sales depended on marketing through and validation by a narrow set of relatively trusted discovery channels, which customer the perceived risk to buyers. Now everything is untrusted, no one wants to pay much upfront but everyone expects ongoing support over they've got the thing. I’m not saying subscription is the only thing that works, but it's pretty easy to see that the calculus facing the average vendor has shifted tremendously over time.

It's a bunch of things. In the old days, if you bought software in a box for your OS (let's say DOS), you didn't expect it to need to be updated. It also continued to work just fine and maybe you didn't update your OS that frequently or had security issues to worry about. Nowadays, iOS gets updated every year and APIs get deprecated, and users update, so you have to maintain the app after initially shipping it.

A lot of people also expect the software to add features over time. In the old days, you'd ship a brand new major version and charge people for that and stop working on the old one. With the App Store, I suppose you could technically abandon the old version and sell a whole new version, but then all your old users will be annoyed if the app is removed from the store or no longer works when they update their OS. You could gate new features behind a paywall, and I know some apps do this, but then it adds to the complexity of the app as you have to worry about features that work for some users but not others.

I think people also expect software nowadays to be cheap or free, I think due to large corporations being able to fund free stuff (say gmail) by other means (say ads or tracking users). That means users would balk if you asked them to pay $50 for your little calendar app, so if you did ask for a one-time payment, it would be $5-$10, which is nowhere near enough to recoup whatever time you spent, unless you hit it big. Hitting it big nowadays with an app is difficult since there's so much competition in the App Stores and everyone has raced to the bottom to sell apps for pennies.

The exceptions that prove the rule.

That's fine, people like you aren't my customer anyway and thus do not need to be listened to. Free users generally have value if they can convert to paid, because nothing is truly free in life.

Thanks for the heads up. I’ll definitely keep that in mind. I’m curious though, what other downsides did you run into when using iCloud sync? Would love to learn from your experience.

I agree, but unfortunately ratings are rather useless until you've gathered at least a couple dozen of them.