Why is My Movies 4 a paid-for upgrade?
My Movies 4 is after three years of free updates to My Movies 3 now available as a new paid-for upgrade, with a significantly improved feature set compared to My Movies 3.
There will at any time be a guarantee of a minimum of three years between paid-for upgrades.
Our applications have never been sold, or advertised with a promise of eternal free updates - we know however that some people have come to expect application purchases in the app stores to include eternal free updates - this is not, and have never been the case for any application, but it may however differ how different application providers handle updates. Time have shown that application providers (who are not providing applications as a supplemental service to other solutions) who have followed an eternal free updates model are also those who over time have had to abandon development on their applications.
While Apple have never advertised app purchases as including eternal free updates, they have also not been as proactive as we would have liked in informing users that they cannot expect eternal free updates on app purchases in the store - meanwhile, Apple is frequently selling you new devices, while making prior devices obsolete by not allowing a device to be upgraded with the latest iOS versions, and therefore making them unable run new application updates. At the same time, Apple is on-going earning 15-30% in commision on all purchases in the store besides advertisting income when users market their apps. We are not selling you hardware, or have any on-going advertisment or commision income, and therefore need to secure funds for future support and development through software sales only.
It is important for us to state that My Movies 3 will continue to function on any of your current devices with any current OS version, however, as the application as of the release of My Movies 4 won't receive further updates, there is no guarantee that My Movies 3 will be functional on new device models or OS versions, for the simple fact that we cannot know what changes these new devices and operating systems will bring.
Continuing to provide a quality service around our applications is very important, both in relation to product support, services for reporting missing titles and incorrect data, as well as fast and reliable updates for new devices and operating systems, and providing eternal free updates to our applications is not a long term viable business model, and would undoubtedly result in us having to cease operation of our service, which would also affect existing customers.
We have chosen a model where we provide a new major version of our applications with a minimum of three years in between, and offer the new application at half price to existing customers (as we cannot target this, it is for a limited period only).
Unfortunately, Apple is as supplier of the App Store not providing us with the options we would like to have had for providing paid-for upgrades and target upgrade pricing to existing customers specifically - we therefore have to release the application with an introduction and upgrade price for a limited time, and advertise this offering to existing customers - providing upgrades as an in-app purchase is an option, but since Apple does not support family library for in-app purchases, providing our separate Pro application at half price for a limited period is of benefit to families ability to share their purchase.
We have previosly offered an option of an in-app upgrade after the upgrade offer, but we will with the My Movies 4 update be changing the application to a subscription based model for the users who choose not to upgrade when the new version is released - upgrading directly when a new version is relased is therefore much more attractive than waiting, as the alternative later on is a subscription based model, or upgrading to the Pro version at full price.
It is our hope that you will understand and support our way of handling the situation, even if you do not find yourself upgrading to the new application. Knowing that a new application will cause some bad reviews on the App Store, which is problematic for future sales, and therefore future support, we hope that you will leave an honest review on the App Store based on the quality and features of the application, rather than the fact that we were unable to create this new version as a free upgrade.
Thank you for your support.