Day One Goes Premium Subscription
and of course the mob outrage in App Store ratings is what you'd expect: MacDrifter.
And this is why I only do bare minimum maintenance of my App Store software now. I released Brigand as free with a $10 unlock, and got savaged for it, so I pulled it. If Nintendo can't make that work with Mario, Apple giving them the front page, and millions in advertising, I sure can't. I love Brigand, but unless I put in more work changing the business model, I can't sell it; sunk cost fallacy tells me not to do that.
Productivity software should cost more than a game, but very few on iOS are willing to pay up front every single new version.
Apple doesn't let you give old customers an upgrade price, and presumably never will; maybe an upgrade killed Phil Schiller's pet/child/Camaro in front of him, or something, given the 9 years he's heard developers request this feature and told us to pound sand. And Apple does nobody any favors by Sherlocking and undercutting developers with "free" or cheap productivity apps.
The older solution of releasing a new numbered version and abandoning the old one every year or so was completely user-hostile. I just refused to do it, and would always switch apps whenever someone tried, and often found a better app by doing this.
Maybe the subscription model is terrible, but it's less terrible than anything else going on.
Michael Tsai wonders if the hostile reviews are from prices going up, but they're just catching up to desktop/web service prices, usually because a subscription gets you cross-platform access now.
Long-term, I think the App Store will be seen as the worst-managed disaster in the history of software. It went from a nice slot machine for indie devs and gallery for a few professional companies, to a predatory flea market full of thieves and frauds. Trying to tell anyone you make real software and here's a reasonable price, in that environment, is a waste of time.