Campbell Interactive

This morning there was a bit of a dust up over this blog post that was written lamenting the fact that upgrading to the latest version of Tweetie on the iPhone was going to cost the same $2.99 that it cost to buy the app in the first place. The author, as I understand it, is upset that he in effect has to buy the app all over again in order to enjoy the new features. Now if you think about it your first reaction might be the same as mine and hundreds if not thousands of others out there that this is a bit ludicrous to whine about three dollars for an app that as John Gruber put it so deftly “only runs on handheld devices that cost at least $200, most of which come with a $70/month service”.

It does seem a bit childish to quibble over such a paltry sum, and to be sure the great work that Loren Brichter has done on the app deserves to be compensated, I mean this is at least part of the reason people develop iPhone apps is it not. We are talking about a capitalist system here, supply and demand and what not. The thing that really got me thinking is would we really care so much about this rant if he had be talking about something that cost $300 dollars instead of three? This response to the post by Jeff Lamarche uses this analogy “when Adobe releases a new version of Photoshop or Microsoft releases a new version of Word with “a slew of new features and functionality”, those are, of course, free, right?” the answer to this rhetorical question is “of course not” but at the risk of sounding as though I am coming to the defense of this horrible person who complains over $3 dollars Adobe doesn’t charge full price for those upgrades either.

This is really the crux of this situation, since the inception of the app store there has been a revolution around the idea of commerce, especially in the software plus services arena. Huge corporations have shifted their paradigms creating whole initiatives around understanding this new concept, embracing it, emulating it, mirroring it, outright copying it. Will they be successful? Only time will tell but for the case of this brouhaha one aspect of the iPhone store model plays a very large part and it is this idea that you can sell a quality product that will engender mass appeal for the low low price of anything from free to what have you and be profitable. In the case of this complaint and complaints against the complaint it becomes apparent that while these applications are, for the most part, quality applications that are well designed offering wonderful services they do create this amazing catch 22 where we at once consider them both very valuable and worth abandoning at the drop of the hat for the next best thing even if it’s a polished up version of the same thing because of these low low prices.

If I had to pay the same amount for Adobe’s CS3 as I did for CS2 in order to have the new and improved bits you bet I would be complaining and my voice would be drowned out in the sea of dissent from many many others. Why does this analogy not hold for a $3 dollar iPhone app? Because it’s only $3 dollars? At what price does it become acceptable to complain?

Let me ask it a different way, imagine if today I bought a fart app for $3 and then tomorrow the developer dropped an update he had reworked from the ground up adding like ten new fart sounds and in order to enjoy this new flatulence I had to yet again pay $3, should I complain? The question of can I complain is moot not just because I was buying a fart app, mostly because I was buying a fart app but I digress. The question I have is am I going to be blasted with “if you don’t think it’s worth the $3 dollars don’t buy it” or “the guy has to eat”, I mean does timing or any other factor affect the scenario at all or is price the sole determinant for the freedom to express displeasure in a situation such as this?

It seems that this new rock bottom pricing, this catch 22 of valuing the valueless has made for an interesting scenario for the consumer has it not? You can buy a great product cheap but don’t consider it an investment and if a full price upgrade comes out keep your mouth shut.

Am I wrong?