100% this! I liked their Kramer Tape plugin but soon discovered that I could only install it on one computer but if I wanted to I could apparently pay the same again, anually, to enable a “secondary license”
Ridiculous PITA. Never spending a penny with them again.
Although I have no issue with NI and Arturia, the sheer number of installers I have is absurd but they’re preferable to iLok holding licenses hostage because I didn’t de-register them before I upgraded my HDD to an SSD and now there is no means of doing so.
Centralising installation and licensing takes us closer to “app stores”. Really handy, but rich with problems. Apple are currently under investigation for breach of monopoly laws because of their fee structure and installation restrictions on iOS.
I wonder if licensing (not distribution/installation), could be solved with certificates? Vendors and users swap public keys; vendors give users a license encrypted by both keys; software asks the computer it’s installed on for the license. This would need OSs to step up their identity/certificate game (tools, UIs etc) considerably.
I’ve had nothing but terrible experiences with them. One of my interactions with them:
At the NAMM where they premiered SoundGrid, we went to their booth to ask questions and see what kind of dev tools were available. Instead of answering our questions or taking us seriously, the Waves representative decided to make fun of my business partner for being a ginger. Peak professionalism right there.
The subscription model is a market trend that Wall St loves, and so publicly traded companies can’t ignore it.
All the buzz surrounds the concept of NRR (net recurring revenue).
A company with X paid subscribers has the ability to project monthly revenue in a predictable manner. Cash is King. So, positive cashflow is like a royal parade. Being able to effectively predict financials is a key element to being a darling among financial analysts.
Certainly there are those who can elaborate more accurately and explain more adeptly.
On the plus side, as a subscriber, you have a longer term relationship with a vendor. Survivors these days need to lead in service, and so, if you’re paying a monthly fee, you’re hopefully entitled to decent service. It’s much easier those who do business on discreet transactions to invite you to kick rocks in response to your first complaint or request for help.
If it’s not possible to cancel a month here or there, that’s kind of a drag.
Can you buy a month of adobe premier, and then turn it off after a month, and then turn it back on a month later?
I also Like Valhalla’s simple downloads.
I find the IO Multimedia and Arturia stores cumbersome.
But, I’ve always been able to get what I needed without asking for help. I don’t visit them everyday.
Novation Components for use with the OG Circuit leaves a lot to be desired, and I dread using it - but that’s more of a matter of UI/UX, not distribution - (although it’s also a sample distribution channel).
I guess make good software, support it, and price it what it’s worth.
i really wish there was something like steam for software, especially music software and plug-ins.
a place that lets me define where i want everything to be saved(daws, plugins, sample folders) and saves that preference in the cloud.
one software where i can find out when something i own got an update.
offline mode of course is a must.
this or just a binary without any copy protection, don’t make it harder for paying customers than pirates.
…how to make sure, there’s frequent cashflow coming in to keep ur product on point, come up with new ones, if ur product is all and nothing but soft…code…zeros and ones…a cpu’s hot air breath…
let’s make them rent our product…?
let’s make them pay for each next main update…?
let’s bundle it with hardware to buy and give the sofware away for free…?
let’s make them pay once and never look back…?
let’s make them pay a reasonable price in comparison and if they wanna stay part of the game, let’s make them pay another fee whenever they feel the need again to do so…?
one of these paymodels MUST be ur businessplan if ur in sofwarebusiness…
if u go for the rent model…i’m defenitly out…
if u go for the last option, that’s the bitwig style, i’m all in…
…just realised it’s u asking, ess…so i’d like to add, that i’ve seen too many…and hell yeah, if it’s not dead simple, straight forward and obviously fair, it’s only annoying and i will defenitly love to miss out on it…
no matter how fancy it might be…
on the other hand i wanna say… i never ever used a crack apart from my very first cubase floppy disc for an amiga…
but there are so so so many that run cracks…
for now and for u, i’d say, try to follow sonic charge, sugabytes and valhallas examples to proceed…
if ur aiming for bigger mainframe stuff…bitwig is doing great…
never take the ilok road…and of course not the next big epic fail soon to come to a final dead road end…adobe…
while best money from developers point of view is in ios apps…
If 80% of users are android and spend an average of $20/yr on apps and iOS is 20% with a yearly average of $100/yr, supposing 1b users, your addressable market is $1.6b for android and $2.0b on ios.
This are made up numbers (like yours) but the general impression I have from the web is if you can only afford to dev for one environment you’re market is much bigger.
Maybe the preference depends what kind of user you are.
Myself – like some others who have posted – I don’t buy many plugins, and I’m also kind of crotchety about bloatware, spyware and software that assumes I’m online 24/7. So I like the stuff that offers a simple dedicated installer that I can download and run myself, that offers a one-time challenge/response. If I need to use a different computer, I just download them again and find my password from somewhere in the depths of my email folder.
If I were using that whole labyrinth of NI stuff, for example, hell yeah I’d accept the need for some kind of management app to automagically sort that shit out for me. But I’ve deliberately avoided that whole world, partly for that reason.
I’ll also say: users need realistic expectations. I think some underestimate how much effort it takes to stay compatible (especially on Mac) with the latest OS changes. To me, it seems fair – for one-time purchases rather than subscriptions – to limit the number of updates included in your purchase, a la Bitwig. I thought that was stingy at first, but now I work in music software myself it makes sense (LOL) (because Apple makes so much work for devs with each update).
I did not “invent” figures, I consulted them.
It is sure that the Apple user spends more, he already proves it on the purchase of the device but 4x more, is this real?
If your application is good at the base, the broadest sales spectrum is more profitable because you will be in this “20%” purchase on 80% of machines .
In addition Windows 11 seems to support Android apps…
let’s not take this road again…apple fan boys against windows fan boys…
let’s face it…we’re all nothing but androids…end of all days…one way or the other…ain’t we…?
it remains all just drawing by numbers, patterns, codes…
Purely on a developmental perspective, because of diversity of hardware versus fixed ecosystem, Android appears to be somewhat of a nightmare for music apps. The lack of any kind of accepted plugin standard is also an issue.
Marek from Elf Audio has spoken about the troubles he experienced when porting Koala Sampler to Android. Time vs money makes it a complete joke but he was committed to ensuring that Android users weren’t left out
I don’t do iOS music apps (mostly), so forgive me if I’ve remembered this wrong. I thought the “standard” in iOS music came from apps and app developers coalescing around a 3rd party convention, rather than from Apple providing core tech.
What’s stopping that happening on Android?
(I suppose it might still have been Apple providing APIs at just the right abstraction to be useful… as I understand it, that’s how macOS audio developed)
AFAIK it was Apple but I think the largest issue is the variety of devices developers are expected to support on Android. Everything from a 30£ TV box to a 1000£ tablet has a user that expects you to be able to deal with whatever hardware they have and there’s no real standardisation. With Apple, even going back a lot of years, there’s only a few dozen options.
Just to had to diversity of the hardware, a while ago, Androïd had poor support for low-latency audio. There has been progress on that front but that’s too late: meanwhile the market has set on iOS.
I’m talking about market share in the context of a discussion about software distribution and answer your sentence above, no fanboys or software religion for me.
Apple’s iOS market share in Europe is 30% and 57% in America. 69% in Japan. Richest markets.
For general e-commerce in 2017, “On average, Android users spend $11.54 per transaction. iPhone users, on the other hand, spend a whopping $32.94 per transaction.”
For non games, 77% of all app revenue went to iOS vs the others. That’s $24.7/$32.1 billion dollars spent. Nearly 4x.
If you want to make money selling an app you build on iOS. You can’t even make as much money selling ads on android because the marketing companies who you sell ads to know your users spend 1/3 on e-commerce than their iOS counter parts.
I’m not going to spend too much energy on a discussion about software distribution, but the top 5 sites I find on WORLDWIDE phone sales market share give me 15% for Apple …
It’s in French but you should find the word Apple and the acronym%.
This is moreover the figure advanced by one of your last source. (different from the first three)
This sentence from the same source:
“This is partly due to iPhone being more popular in regions with high income, such as Japan and the United States, which also tends to spend more on apps.”
Seems logical even if the United States and Japan use excessive protectionism to block certain Chinese brands, a political choice therefore subject to change, which is not the case on the majority of the planet.
Still, Windows with 80% of the market (to see how many will migrate to the 11th of course) and soon support for Android apps means that if I had to develop the Audio app it is not IOS that I would target.
Not to mention the number of times I hear “my app is not compatible with the Mac update”, that is to say an additional slice of work without income for the dev.
In short “the facts” remains a concept with variable geometry.