One of most talked about features from the upcoming iPhone 3.0 release is In-App Purchases. The examples from 3.0 preview event illustrate its use: game developers can sell additional levels, city guides can sell new locations, and e-book readers can purchase new paid content.
These are all obvious wins for iPhone app developers, though it has been pointed out that it could be a disaster for users.
Apple’s SVP of iPhone Software, Scott Forestall, cited wanting to support other business models as the motivation for creating In-App Purchase. There is, however, one business model that Apple chose not to support. Quoting Engadet’s coverage, Forestall said:
“This is for paid apps only… Free apps remain free.”
In Apple, please support iPhone trial apps, David Sinclair points out that the choice to limit In-App Purchase to paid-apps means that there is still no “trialware” option, short of the clunky “lite” app method already employed.
David’s article weighs the potential user confusion of pay-within-free apps to the complexity associated upgrading from a lite app to its full-strength counterpart, including downloading the full app, reconfiguring the app, sandbox induced difficulty transferring user data, etc.
David has issued a call-to-action to ask Apple to support a trialware model by filing a bug report duplicating his. Be sure to reference his bug by include using this internal Apple identifier: rdar://problem/6699761.
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