Notability went subscription and existing users will have to pay in a year

Software
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That is just my opinion, naturally. I find I rarely use Notability. As Macsorcery said there are lots of templates for GoodNotes on Etsy. I have a lovely planner in Good Notes which I do use. It seems to be a more creative app.

I am just disappointed and a bit miffed watching one app after another following into the abyss. Apple is encouraging developers to implement subscriptions and it is disconcerting.

They are not charging anything outrageous but just who do they think they are kidding touted Notability as a free app which is donating their software to kids. And I do not think the app is worth $15 per year and especially $60 in four years.

If I wasn’t retired I would care less because I had money coming in.

I’d like something if I spend my money. It feels better that way. Instead of checking every week to make sure I didn’t accidentally sign on to some subscription service. Then you have to worry about renewing or if you are signing on to too many. I am careful but I’ve accidentally signed up for an app.

When I am looking at apps, half the time I have to go to the website to determine the actual costs. They list a number of prices and don’t bother to explain. The prices are way down on the bottom of the ad.

Charge for upgrades.I don’t have a problem with it but evidently Apple is precluding that.

I apologize. Your comment was relative to comparing the two apps. Actually there are dozens of notes apps out there. I know because I have half of them. And you are right. They are just different.

I went back and looked at Notability though and figured I just was not going to miss it.

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Just gonna chip in my 2 cents here. Disclaimer: not a user of Notability or any of its competitors. I just annotate PDFs with lines on them for compatibility purposes.

I think the idea of locking previously paid-for features is, while not strictly illegal, a bit irritating. It makes it so that I wouldn’t want to pay for a subscription to Notability’s developers for fear that they’d pull other tricks later down the road. I don’t like subscriptions but I think they’re necessary sometimes and even good if executed correctly. Would argue Notability’s method is about as sad of an execution as it gets.

Also, as a developer, I have to say that the assumption from some people in this thread that software is a build-once sell-infinitely business is scarily inaccurate. Even setting aside OS changes, things like web apps constantly have bugs to squash and web APIs to keep up with. And no, that’s not a small task. It still takes time and developers are still entitled to compensation for that time and effort.

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Different thing though, unless the app relies on cloud services to function.

“We appreciate that you paid a one-time fee for our software. Just letting you know we’re going out of business in a year, so we won’t be updating our software for new versions, or fixing bugs. You’re on your own from here on out.”

is different from:

“We’ve decided that your one-time fee you just paid for our software wasn’t really a payment for an app per se, but more like a payment for a first year of a software subscription.”

All analogies fall apart at some point, but imagine buying a car from a used car dealer and then discovering, two months into the deal, that your purchase had been converted into a monthly rental payment.

I think that’s really the core of the issue. Treat purchasers like purchasers, and offer them a good deal to become subscribers if they want to do so.

The fact that all of their articles about their move to subscription mostly promote that “the app is now free”, rather than “the app is moving to a subscription model”, seems disingenuous to me.

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Well-said! That’s what many developers did initially. They honored their commitment to their loyal customers. They were essentially grandfathered in. Yes, it would make so much sense to entice their customers with features, good prices or whatever it takes. But that takes work.

I cannot even remember which ones. But I do recall that Day One was one of them. They honored their commitment because it is a commitment. Unfortunately, I saw where they were headed and I suppose to avoid paying Apple for Cloud back-up they went out and found their own. Great. My deepest (occasionally not the sunniest) words are now in the hands in I-haven’t-a-clue. Not everyone takes privacy as seriously as Apple does. So I stayed with the original Day One and never did upgrade. They shut out the people who did, just not right away. (They skipped a version!) Just sad. They started out being very appreciative of people nice enough to spend their hard earned cash with them.

My entries are stuck in there. I’ll probably just get them out by cutting and pasting. What a chore!

Suddenly Fantastical went subscription. I just left. I am not even going to deal with it. I use Busy Cal and Apple’s Calendar.

Where is their sense of fairness? Whoever is running these shows just are blowing off their customers. For the betterment of the app? Somehow I think the dollar signs get in the way because it is easy money when you are talking about a huge company like whomever is running Day One.

And they count on people not reading the contracts. Few people know how. They are not worded for the average Joe. No way.

There is one art app, very basic. The man in charge keeps swindling his customers by changing the payment model. I wrote up a scathing review he kept removing it. LOL! If he is ever hauled into Court I don’t care what his contract reads, he can very well lose it is so obvious what he is up to. It is a shame because it was a nice little app.

I suspect this subscription mania is going to eventually bottom out because most people do not have a lot of money and are struggling at least somewhat. It is not that hard to select an alternative to Notability. There are a LOT.

On the other hand, you have an app like SetApp that is just wonderful. It has 40, 50 apps probably more to select from. It is a wonderful model. Every app I have tried is at least average and some are outstanding. Sure, I’ll fork over $10 a month. It takes care of my tendency to try lots of apps. That is the whole idea. Really?

You take Houdah alone, I love it. I can find anything on my computer. Clean My Mac, Ulysses (ok, I forgive you… actually I still have one of their old versions which works), Ad Guard, Rapid Weaver, Mars Edit, NotePlan, Swift Publisher. I’m in Hog Heaven! That’s the idea. You make the best app you know how, respect your customers and they WILL support you.

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You might be able to write a Keyboard Maestro script (s) that would help with. this kind of relative chore.

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$1 a month for a service that most of its users will use daily seems reasonable to me. I avoid subscriptions but as a former developer who I can see the sense and need in today’s market.

IOS/MacOS evolve rapidly and Apple place new requirements on developers regularly, even if functionality doesn’t change. People want the hardware they buy (which costs much more than the software!) to be supported in their apps.

I learned through experience that actually developing the software is not the greatest cost. You can do well as a developer so long as you’re making new sales, but once you have a saturated market and happy customers it’s only outgoings from then on. Ironically, the happier your customers are the less ongoing revenue you make as they use decade old versions (which run but you aren’t allowed to sell on the App Store).

I expect Notability are servicing debt too.

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That is indeed true if you use the handy Export > Plain Text/Markdown (which, of course, is what most of us probably want). However, there is a fairly easy way to split the resulting text file. If you run the following command on the output file in Terminal:

split -p '^ Date:' journal.txt out

(obviously substituting for journal.txt the name of the file you created on export) the file will be split into individual entries each named something like outa, outb, etc. (Note there is a tab before the word Date:. You enter that by pressing ⌃V and then pressing the tab key.)

Now that does not, on the face of it, sound terribly useful. However, if you use [Hazel (https://www.noodlesoft.com/) it’s possibly substantially to automate and improve the process. Here’s a link to a post I wrote on the Hazel forum describing how I use Hazel to prepare individual diary entries for import to DEVONThink. If you omit the final (DEVONThink smart rule) step you’ll just end up (pretty well automatically) with individual, date named diary markdown files.

Stephen

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This’s not the issue here (not for me, at any rate). It’s the loss of features users have already paid for.

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The statement is not factually incorrect, but it is clearly designed to mislead. That’s not disingenuous - that’s dishonest

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As others have mentioned, even if you stay with, say, iOS 11, Apple still updates it here and there, and each update has the potential to break the software. The dev has to at least check the software to make sure it still works, for every active version of iOS and iPadOS and MacOS across multiple devices. They get $0.00 from you but are still having to do work on what you bought seven years ago.

The fact is the app store opened with 1000 apps. They are now pushing 3.5 million. Whether those are one-time purchases or subscription, there are some problems converging. Too many choices is one problem. More apps than customers w/ dollars is another. Not enough customers to give the developers a living wage is another. The subscription trend was inevitable, really. It’s happening in journalism as well.

Sure, we’re used to free news and free apps. Free everything on the internet. But that is an unsustainable model. Developers have to pay bills just like you do.

Theoretically a Notability user could have purchased an early version (say Notability 5 which was a Universal upgrade and cost $2.99 new or upgraded v. 4 users for FREE) and used it for eight years now. Is $1/month starting next year really that much to ask?

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May I ask which version you originally bought, and what you paid?

Well then, there ya go!

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I appreciate your response. We can agree on many things. Much of what you said I didn’t object to or resist in my original post.

Yes, it takes a little work to maintain compatibility with minor OS revisions. The expectation of that work should be built in to the original price just like bug fixes. Developers aren’t failing to make a living wage because they’re maintaining compatibility with minor upgrades. I haven’t seen anyone on this thread express frustration with developers for eventually saying “you’re on your own for compatibility from x point forward.” The frustration is when developers begin charging for something I already paid for once (compatibility with the existing version) or take away features I already paid for and put them behind a paywall.

I don’t see anyone on this side of the argument (on these forums) who doesn’t think software is worth paying for. We get the amount of work involved in new features and compatibility across major OS updates. But in most arguments from your position the regular maintenance of commercial software (which should have been planned and budgeted for) and updates and improvements over time all get conflated in the argument for why we should all be willing to buy subscriptions.

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Exactly. To take @webwalrus’s analogy a bit further (and probably mangle it):

I buy a car. A few years later, the manufacturer comes back to me and says, “You can keep using your car at no additional charge. Oh, you want to be able to put it in reverse, and refill the gas tank? Those features require a yearly subscription now.”

(Unlimited edits and iCloud sync are about as essential for a note app as reverse gear and gas are for a car, I think.)

If I hadn’t already paid for Notability, I wouldn’t think the $15 unreasonable.

I’m already using GoodNotes anyway, and will stay there. I moved because Notability didn’t allow multiple-level organization, and it’s projection mode wasn’t great (I need to be able to project an entire page). They’ve fixed the former issue, but projection is still a problem.

Edited to add: if this were a major version upgrade and they’d fixed the projection issue, I’d happily pay an upgrade fee. Or if they’d added in the new organization capabilities but locked them behind a subscription paywall, I’d be fine with that, too.

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You should probably get used to this though. As part of the transition I mentioned, with developers trying to figure out the best way to make ends meet, there are few options. Routing something through non-iCloud servers is one way a lot of them seem to be taking. They have to find the right mix to push enough people to the new pricing model to make it worthwhile.

Frankly, to be honest, they should probably NOT care about people like yourself. People who don’t mind the new price, either existing users or new ones, are the only people they should care about. If you are balking at $1/month (current early-bird price) you’re not really their target market.

Some in this thread are really angry or disappointed about losing something already paid for. I would say that you should brace yourself because life is full of things like this. I’ll spare you my Buddhist philosophy quotes ha

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What argument is this? Because life is full of bad things, so we should all feel okay with bad things? If you wanna enjoy your retirement, that’s probably a fine attitude. What a boring world it would be if people are all living as a buddhists.

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If you are balking at $1/month (current early-bird price) you’re not really their target market.

$1 a month here and $1 a month there soon mounts up and the first one to go or never be paid is the one that treats their customers badly.

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That is precisely the issue. Seldom is the price of an individual subscription an issue. The issue is being a wise steward of one’s resources. At some point $1 here, $1 there adds up to real cost, the highest being the opportunity cost of not investing that amount over time (forget savings as an investment. With today’s interest rates one is falling behind inflation). I consider app subscriptions like leasing (renting) a car–for most people it is a bad investment–good for the dealer, bad for the lesee. It reminds me of politicians selling an expensive new program. “What is $15B in a $2T budget–its just a drop in the bucket.” Perhaps but those drops accumulate and pretty soon you are under water.

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This may be the first time I ever upset someone by merely mentioning Buddhism. LOL

For the record, not a Buddhist.

Also for the record, please note my original context. I was specifically referring to ‘losing something already paid for’ - I was not making a broader point about all bad things.

But yes, if your expectation is that you should never be disappointed by a software developer, you might want to adjust that expectation.

Look, I’m always juggling subscriptions and app choices just like the next person. In a ‘perfect’ world I would choose one set of apps, they would always do everything I needed, and their pricing would exactly match my budget. But that’s not my expectation, and that’s a good thing!

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I have bad news for you …

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When someone brings up bad subscriptions, I point to Smile Software. I pay their subscription because they told me that I would be getting regular updates to my iOS Textexpander with the subscription model instead of those big updates once a year. I paid because I need this functionality in iOS.

It has now been over a year since the last update to TextExpander for iOS, despite bugs and a flaky keyboard. They are literally stealing from me. They can do this because iOS is locked down and there are no alternatives, unlike the Mac where they can be easily replaced with aText, Keyboard Maestro, or Alfred.

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