is likely this.

Seriously speaking, it’s the developer’s rights to switch to a subscription service, but one would have thought that after what happened to Textexpander developers would think twice about taking the scorched earth approach, by taking away what you sold to your customers previously and forcing them to either stop using your app or

Yes, Twitterrific 5 might have been out for 7 years, and there were (probably) many updates during this period of time, but the only changes that I (and probably many others) have noticed are the inclusion of the dark interface (or was it there all along?) and the fail attempt to charge for changing app icons.

Now its primary competitor, Tweetbot, have since gone through more updates and charged increasingly higher prices, but Tweetbot’s loyal customers have always gone back. Not to mention that one can still access older versions of Tweetbot even if they chose not to buy the new one.

Twitterrific, however, have stayed at version 5 for many years, and while there was a change from outright selling the app for 3 dollars to giving the app away with ads and charging 5 dollars to disable them (always a bad idea, people tend to get used to the ads if they downloaded the app with ads in it in the first place).

So imagine everyone’s surprise when their app was suddenly updated, now littered with arguably more distracting ads and have no way to disable them except to pay 10 dollars per year or 30 dollars to buy the app outright. How will you feel if the McDonalds breakfast you have been eating for years and paying 5 dollars each time suddenly tells you one day that their new price is 50 dollars? Extreme price increases usually don’t work, especially if the goods in question are not necessities. ]

The sudden huge increase in pricing and the misleading “forever” wording to indicate the full app purchase pricing does not inspire confidence in customers, who, even if they are willing to fork out the money, are unsure if version 6 will last another 7 years, or just another year. It does feel like the developer suddenly needed a lot more money than before, even though that is probably not the case.

I have always been using Tweetbot as my main Twitter client, and paid for most prior versions of Twitterrific because it was always a good Twitter app, and sometimes Twitterrific is faster at adopting new OS features, even if it is never my first choice. Now I guess I will just delete it.