We hear the comment, quite frequently in fact, "Your software should be free". And from the number of cracks & key gens floating around - it goes beyond just comments. It becomes quite clear many people think they have some god given right to free mobile apps, even when the act of installing them is nothing short of stealing. I'm here to tell you that FREE just doesn't work, and that the cost of free isn't ZERO - in fact the true cost of free is nothing short of the loss of innovation in the industry.
Why?
Free doesn't pay the bills. Free doesn't feed families. Free doesn't give back to the Local/National/Global economies. Where's the motivation to innovate, and develop that next killer feature, when you're just giving the apps away. Why urgently update the app for the latest released devices? Why put in the long days, weeks and months when there's no reward for your hard work? Free essentially removes any and all motivation from the equation.
Free doesn't pay for support. What developer/company in their right mind is going to pay for a proper support staff to respond to common issues, which when dealing with the countless variables involved in running apps across a plethora of devices occur more frequently than not. Take Gmail for example - how long does it take to get a non-robot based response? Never? Many "Free" apps have even started charging for "Premium" support, as they clearly can't provide the service for free.
Freeware is rarely multi-platform. How often do you see those free Android or iPhone apps available for all five primary smartphone platforms - Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile - Let alone the up and coming platforms (Bada, Maemo/Meego, etc)? Very, very seldomly. Why? It requires a fairly good sized development team to have the experience required, and manpower to pull off any relatively elaborate app across all platforms. So what happens when you decide to trade in your Android or a Blackberry and your favorite app isn't available? Well, you're out of luck. That's another high cost of free.
What about Ads? Well, Ads are certainly interesting, but I've yet to see that Ad-based systems are ready for prime time. Ads require a data plan, and data usage (in almost all implementations), which is certainly not free. In most Ad-based systems, for the developer to get paid, the user needs to click on the Ad. Web banner ads rarely get clicked, so why would you think someone is going to click on a tiny ad they can hardly read. So we're back to the developer effectively giving their app away again, with only the Ad aggregators actually making any money off the deal. Plus the mobile industry is so global, it's difficult to obtain a large enough mass of users in any one specific market for many of the aggregators to obtain any but the largest of advertisers, greatly reducing the available ad-inventory.
What's worse than Free? Nearly free. The iPhone has done a dandy job (at least in the US) of mobile application value destruction. This has carried over to the Android Market as well (but not quite as bad). It seems if you're going to achieve any sales volume on iTunes, you need to price your app around $1 - about what you would expect to pay for a song. Apps are worth more than the price of a song. While one can assume the cost of producing a song is in most cases more expensive than the cost of developing a mobile app, the cost of maintaining and supporting an application far exceeds that of the song. Song's don't require support. Songs don't require updates and fixes.
On the Android Market you can get away with up to $5 in some cases, but that's likely to change as competition increases and that lonely developer in China who can actually live on $200 a month, is happy selling his wares at rock bottom prices. Ease of development is also sadly to blame (on the iPhone especially) as the platform is so closed, building apps is a breeze - so easy even a cave man can do it. And while this may lead to greater short term innovation and participation, I think the long term effects will be just the opposite. This definitely makes Symbian and BlackBerry overall much more compelling platforms to develop on, as each has managed to retain higher value for their mobile apps, due to the higher complexity of developing for these platforms, and as a result, less competition.
You see, free isn't REALLY free - it's simply naivety (or in the case of cracks - utter ignorance and lack of respect). For the price of a couple latte's you can buy any one of our Killer Mobile ® Apps, receive frequent updates and direct support - and you still think they should be free?
Cheers!
Josh Alner
