This is kind of a bad example because the value proposition is different but still very clear - the default version of the app provides a regular income stream to the developers.

No, I was quite intentional about that example. My assertion remains: if they’re not providing regular value, then I don’t feel obliged to provide them with regular income.

I don’t hope that they go hungry or anything. I just don’t think it’s my responsibility to subsidize them forever just because they made an app for me once. I’ve got bills to pay too.

Software as a Service is only a value when the service offers you something that the software on its own cannot do; otherwise it’s just rent seeking.

Paying for cloud storage, for continuous content updates (especially news), or a server to process or generate content that can’t be done on my device, all fine. Paying for a messaging service to pass my messages to others, or for a game to maintain servers for multiplayer play? No problem.

But a subscription to remove ads? Your app doesn’t need an external server to do that. That’s rent-seeking. Same with a subscription to unlock widgets or some third-party connection.

A subscription for regular software updates are right on the line for me. In a sane world, the software package you purchase would be provided with some amount of security updates, but you wouldn’t have to pay any extra until you decided to purchase the next version for new features. You know, like it was until Adobe decided to upend the industry. (Incidentally, it’s weird that Adobe has gone from being the poster child for rent seeking in software to one of the more reasonable companies that’s doing software as a service. I still hate that there’s no way to get their software without a subscription, but at least they are providing some form of continuous value in the form of fonts and stock images and such.)

On the other end of the spectrum you have something like Minecraft, where my ($20? I don’t remember) purchase from over a decade ago is still receiving regular content updates for free, multiple times a year, with no subscription needed. I can pay a subscription fee to get an online realm for myself and my family, but I don’t have to because I can also just set up and operate a server myself. More than reasonable.

Pocket Casts has a server component that makes sense you have to pay for, and for the most part the only things you don’t get with the free version are the server stuff and a little bit of cosmetic stuff. $40/year for 20GB is a little steep, but the fact that they charge for it doesn’t bother me.

With the exception of the folders; that doesn’t make sense to me being a Plus-only thing.

All that being said, I bought the app before it went free, so I am grandfathered in to a lifetime Plus plan; but if that hadn’t been the case I would not be paying for a subscription today.

Yeah, I hope so too. I mean, it’s hard to make any commitments without knowing what the needs would be; the need can be anything on a spectrum from “just money” to “more maintainers,” to “new products” or “bigger ecosystem,” all the way up to “help with governance” or “a forked codebase.” It could also be anything in between or any combination. Committing your whole organization to it before you know what the commitment is feels unwise, so I get it. But I agree, I want them to say more and do more soon.

Gmail.

I’ve been on it for a few months now. It’s basically just Mastodon with the Elk skin, but using Mozilla Accounts for authentication. I think there are a couple more bells and whistles added as well. But overall, I think it’s just a starting point from which they’ll develop something more custom.

Unless that’s an element of some bigger plan I’ve missed?

Actually, yes! In a Verge interview, Mitchell Baker said, “The first step is to actually be an active participant in that world and do some learning.” Link. I’m hopeful that this is the first step toward making ActivityPub a part of the browser, which would go a long way toward elevating it to a staple of the modern web. (As a side note, I’d love it if they extended that sort of idea to RSS as well)

W4, eh? As in “Waiting For?”

Awesome. I submitted this as a Bang on DuckDuckGo. I don’t know if they accept self-links, but it’s worth a try.

I meant “Consume” in the technical sense of downloading and parsing. And yes, the RSS reader is part of what I was looking for (I don’t think I’ve heard of NewsFlash, very excited to look into that).

I’ve been using RSS for a long time, but I find that Feedly is odious, self-hosted alternatives are unnecessarily hard to operate, and the middle ground of paid alternatives doesn’t seem to exist.

I dunno, I think they like the plausible deniability and monopoly regulation shielding that comes from investing in but not owning OpenAI. I think they’ll absolutely find ways to exert more and more control, and once there are reasonable competitors they might snap it up, but for the time being they probably find the distance beneficial.

It makes sense. You can develop for Windows and Linux on Mac, but you can’t develop for Mac or iOS anywhere else but on Mac; at least not easily. In my job, I develop full stack web but also device code for Windows, Mac, and ChromeOS. It’s way more convenient for me to use a Mac with VMware running Windows and ChromeOS than trying to cobble together a device lab.

And they’re on the Fediverse! @arstechnica@mastodon.social

We need webrings to come back for better discoverability. Also, how do you consume RSS?

I also am curious about this.

I wouldn’t block them, but I’d be leaving the group chat.

That still means losing out on a lot of general life stuff. Just, overall.

As if i want my default sms texting app to be getting spammed by a big group chat.

I guess I don’t see how that’s made any different by the group chat being in a different app. I can turn notifications off or make them silent in either case.

Also the default at least here in Australia is pretty much Facebook messenger or maybe WhatsApp not because anyone likes it, but because everyone already has a Facebook account even if they don’t use it much.

Right. But everyone who has a phone has a phone number for texting.

Also it means you can easily have group chats with people who you need to communicate with but you don’t really want to have your number.

Yep, that’s definitely an advantage. I’m not trying to sell you on SMS or iMessage, I’m just trying to explain why it’s popular over here.

What a ridiculous notion to be using a platform specific service for a group chat, unless you are deciding your friends group or work colleagues based on the phone they use which again seems unfathomable.

Uh…wait. I don’t see how that’s different from Facebook or WhatsApp. Especially since iMessage does send messages to users on other devices, it’s just a worse experience for the recipient. Meta is still a platform, it’s just one you access by way of a username connected to your web activity instead of one you access by way of purchasing a specific device.

I am an iPhone user, in Australia and i have seen precisely zero iMessage chat groups even attempt to be created. Because everyone knows it’s a shitty pain in the ass service if someone doesn’t have an iPhone.

I’m glad people are so aware over there, but over here it’s very uncommon for people to even be conscious of what phones their friends use. So an app that works well enough, as far as they can tell, is going to be the accepted default.

We all blame apple for that as we should not the android user. How it ended up inverted in the US is beyond me but it’s backwards af.

Because marketing.

This whole thing is a non issue being caused by lack of thought and logic of the users apparently almost exclusively in the USA

No, it’s caused intentionally by Apple. They spent billions of dollars cultivating that perception in America, and it’s paid off for them.

Personally i wish the default here was discord or signal but messenger is still far better than iMessage at least from a cross platform usability standpoint.

Yeah, and I wish the default here was pretty much anything else too. Like I said, I’m not trying to convince you. Just explaining the situation.

Not to mention absolutely ridiculous. Dumping friends over their preferred messaging platform is literally what the green bubbles problem is.

1. It’s primarily not an active choice. For most iPhone users, it’s just what’s installed, so it’s what they use. The idea that there might be other options doesn’t really occur to them; iMessage came out before any of the other options really became popular, it worked well enough, and it was preinstalled, so that’s what people learned to use.

2. I don’t know what sort of people you are getting into group chats with, but for me it’s not exactly people I can just decide to block on a whim. Family groups, employer groups, friends I was already friends with and would lose contact with if I blocked. I’m not going to torpedo my job and all of those relationships by making a big deal over what messaging service we use, even if their use of iMessage makes my experience worse.

Most Americans aren’t obsessed at all. They just want to use whatever is easiest, and iMessage is preinstalled and mostly works fine with pretty much everyone. The bias toward default is strong.

There are lots of factors going into the dominance of the iPhone in the US. Platform lock-in, the ecosystem, the lack of an alternative with similar levels of polish for several of the early years, the mystique, the design, the build quality, Android’s formerly fractured lineup, the rise of the iPad, app development trends that for a while preferred iPhone first; and, yes, iMessage.

All of those have their own complicated and oroboros-like causes and effects, with some being force multipliers, meaning that pointing at any one thing as the cause for any other is a little bit of a fool’s errand, so I’ll just say they’re definitely related.

Which I guess is the chicken and the egg problem.