I paid a few months ago for pdf expert and really like it, if i have to subscribe I will probably look else where as I highly prefer to pay once. I put too much on my tech plate to manage and having to remember subscriptions too much overhead for me.
Aren’t IPA files bound to a specific Apple ID (that purchased the App)?
I also doubt whether it is legal to (re)distribute them.
I agree that Setapp has a decent selection of productivity apps, and have been paid for the service for two years. What makes me a little annoyed is they haven’t been very transparent about which and why apps got removed from the portfolio. I think this is a problem epidemic to all subscription based products — a continuous sense of instability.
PDF Element is powerful, but the UI is a bit of a mess. I went with PDF Expert because of that. But if PDF Expert starts hiding features I need/want behind a subscription, I am going back to PDF Element.
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The ipa files aren’t bound to an Apple ID. I was saving them prior to whichever iTunes version which stopped downloading them.
I didn’t realize that the iTunes back ups didn’t include the application file
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What happens when SetApp removes an app that you are using? I assume the app fails a license check at some point. Do you get promoted to buy the software to continue using it?
I understand that, but I’m guessing that they have contracts with each of the companies and they don’t get renewed sometimes. Not sure what more they could say, but I get your point.
I believe that it continues to work where you have installed it, but if you ever uninstall it, you can’t reinstall it.
They do not prompt you to buy a license, because that isn’t the business they’re in.
I will say that I’ve kept an eye out for sales (Black Friday, Bundle Hunt, etc) on apps that are in Setapp, just in case I decide against renewing or if they leave the program, although that has only happened once or twice, at least as far as I’m aware of.
The problem seems to me to be not the subscription model but that the price jump is so big. If I had the option, I’d probably be willing to pay as much as $10 a year for the customized toolbar (I’m weird like that), and there are probably others for whom the same goes for Word to PDF conversion (though I have other ways of doing that, if I do it at all). The one-size-fits-all is a tough sell, especially when Readdle is charging $50 for a PDF app without OCR.
Here’s a tip: Fortunately, I hadn’t upgraded my iPhone version 6 yet, so I fired it up and added the one-time Pro option there to “Edit Text”, which is very handy. So now I’m pretty much set. With “restore purchases” that’s now working on my iPad with PDF Expert 7.
It’s a great update to the app, and Readdle seems now to have finally given up on their refusal to work with iCloud (until this week, you had to use “Copy to…” instead of “Open in…” when opening a PDF from Files… like an animal), so I’ve now returned to PDF Expert from PDF Viewer (also great), in part because I like the way it does “handoff” with the macOS app.
What I especially like is the way it allows for exporting summaries of the annotations in an HTML file, and then using the “Share” sheet to fire off a Shortcut that converts the HTML into a PDF in a Compose window in Mail. It’s a nice accompaniment to the annotated PDF when you’re giving people feedback. Or use can use convert the HTML to text (RFT or Markdown) to create a summary of the key, highlighted points from the PDF.
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Ah, the Open In... change is potentially nice. I’ll have to give that a try!
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Wish I hadn’t pressed the update button too quick on my two iOS devices. I’d been meaning to do the £10 Pro upgrade on version 6 for a couple of weeks but hesitated!
Silly me.
That one of the reasons I don’t have the App Store do the updates automatically!
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I love PDF Expert it really is a very nice app, I did a lot of research to find a pdf suitable for my needs, and PDF Expert really exceed many of those, luckily I bought the IOS version with the in-app purchase in July just right before the update 
I understand the need for a subscription format and they also give us Spark “for free”, but I also agree that $50 is a big jump without bigger features like OCR.
Let’s see what happens.
I moved away from PDF Expert (to GoosReader) since they moved to subscription. I’m re-evaluating my options lately as GoodReader can’t edit outlines and texts in the original PDFs.
So after one and half years, there seems to be exactly zero new features added in PDF Expert. As a user who purchased the old IAP, I’m still asked to subscribe for “favorite tools, reduce size, file conversation, and support future development”. I’m interested in if anyone is buying this.
An interesting find is PDFelement Pro, which can edit texts, outlines, and etc. It seems to be a low-cost alternative to PDF Expert. I had the non-pro PDFelement installed. When I open it, it offered me to buy out the pro version for £38.99 for a lifetime license. In an impulse I bought it but I’m regretting a bit. Unlike the old app, the pro version has terrible performance especially for scanned PDFs. It also mandates an account to limit the number of devices to 2.
The thing that made me jump ship is that the new version for Mac is also $50 a year, that’s $100 a year if you want the same app on iOS and MacOS. That’s too much for me for a PDF app.
Which ship are you boarding now?
I ended up settling on PDFpen Pro. I like the Mac app, it does everything I need, and AppleScript support is excellent. The iOS app isn’t great but for my use (signing, filling forms and rearranging pages) it’s enough. For annotations on iOS I use GoodNotes.
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PDF Expert is very disappointing because (even though they have gone subscription):
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They have not implemented OCR although they still have on the web the statement that OCR is coming “very soon”. This comment is from Aug 2019!!!
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It is possible to embed an index when you create a PDF with Acrobat. But PDF Expert is sad in the area of indexing. They apparently cannot access the index that Acrobat has created, nor can they make their own index. Therefore searches are sequential and slow in large documents. The search in Acrobat is essentially instantaneous once an index is created.
PDFpenpro at least has OCR although it also does not handle indexing, so searching large PDFs is tedious.
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WRT 2 about recognizing indexes … Few PDF apps work fully to standards set by Adobe products. Each has its own pitfall. Some issues may be from limitations in being tied to the macOS implementation of PDF (PDFKit???). For reference, I’ve fought a long recent battle on the LaTeX side simply to get a PDF file where the standard meta-tags (e.g. title, author, keywords …) are consistently found across any PDF application on macOS and Windows.
WRT to 1 about “coming soon” statements from 2019 … developers have had to accommodate for a fight against COVID and a fight against Russians. I’m inclined to give broad grace.
In my own experience, I continue to work with PDFExpert on my iPad to markup reports from my team as well as to grade assignments from students. I appreciate the robust, seamless integration with cloud services and the intuitive approach to manage file administration (changing names, labelling with color tags). I appreciate the ability to set up an annotation tool bar with favorites on the left side of the iPad view. Most recently, I appreciated the ability to manipulate the PDF pages on the iPad.
Granted, sometimes with heavy lifting (e.g. markup grading across 30+ reports in one sitting), the app will “hang”. Quitting and swiping the app off the active list on the iPad clears the issue.
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JJW
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