This is just one small corner of what we’ve been working on for OmniGraffle 7. This means that our customers can send OmniGraffle documents to anyone who has a Mac, knowing that they’ll be able to download the latest OmniGraffle for free and view those documents. You don’t have to buy anything to use the app as a document viewer you can just dismiss the licensing dialog-in which case you’ll only be able to open documents in read-only mode. If you check for discounts, validating your previous install, we either offer you discounted upgrade pricing (50% off) or-for recent purchasers-a completely free upgrade to the new version.Īs a bonus, this free download of the app now also works as a free document viewer. But before you purchase anything, we also explain that discounted pricing is available to existing Mac App Store customers. When you first run the app, you’re asked whether you’d like to start a trial or purchase a license. Well, I’m pleased to share that that’s exactly what we’re going to do-starting next month, with the App Store edition of OmniGraffle 7: And we can offer free upgrades to the new versions to any customers who recently purchased the old app. We can offer a discounted upgrade to the new Standard. But we can also offer a free 2-week trial which unlocks all of the features of Pro and Standard, letting you freely choose between them. We can offer our standard unlocks of Standard and Pro, of course. With the original download free, we can implement any pricing options we want to offer customers through In-App Purchases. (Which we’ve never done on our own store either.) They just don’t sell the original download. But what if we take a fresh look at this problem, and make our downloads free? You know, like every iPhone app in the Top Grossing List has already done? It’s not that they don’t sell anything-or they wouldn’t be on that list. We’ve always set that cost to be the standard price of our app, leaving us no way to charge less. The underlying problem, as noted above, is that downloading the app has a fixed cost. And they’ve certainly made changes to the App Store over the years to offer more flexibility in the way people buy software there, even if they haven’t addressed this specific problem. We’ve been asking Apple to extend the App Store to support all of these capabilities, of course. Or to get upgrade discounts on the non-Pro edition of the app. Or to get the price protection that we try to offer all our customers. There’s no way for them to ever try our apps before buying them (unless they’re lucky enough to visit an Apple retail store when our apps are being featured). And while customers can choose to buy directly from us on Mac, our iOS customers don’t have that choice. I guess that’s true enough, at least for our Mac apps. “But that’s just the way the App Store works, isn’t it? At least you do offer customers a choice to use your own store, so it’s not like they’re forced into that experience if they don’t want it.” If that download didn’t have that fixed price, all of these problems would be within our power to solve. On the App Store, you get charged for the app before you can download it.Īll of these limitations stem from a single underlying problem: they’re all due to the fixed cost of the original download of the app. On our store, we’ve always let you try our apps for free before asking you to decide whether to buy them. Since we couldn’t make a similar offer on the App Store, the best we could do was stop selling the app for a while (like we did with OmniPlan last summer) so that customers wouldn’t get stuck with the old app. On our store, we offer customers free upgrades to the next version of the app if they’ve purchased within the last 30 days.On the App Store, we had no way to discount the base price-the best we could do was charge that full price again, but offer our Pro upgrade for free. On our store, we offer an upgrade discount on the base price of the app.And three years later, we finally solved the problem of offering upgrade discounts to our App Store customers, an offer which started with OmniGraffle 6 and continued through the rest of our product line.īut even with those discounts, the experience of buying our apps on the App Store still had some limitations when compared to buying directly from our own online store: We were there with our apps on the day the store launched, so that you could make your own choice about how you wished to purchase our software. From the dawn of the App Store, it’s always been our goal to provide the best possible App Store experience that we can for our apps.
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