this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Disagreed. If it requires a server side element, it incurs an ongoing cost and a subscription can be justified. And to clarify, by "requires", I'm referring to the functionality, not having it shoveled in. And the price should be realistic.
Some apps do this well, Sleep for Android is an example that comes to mind. Free with ads, ad-free is an inexpensive one time purchase. You can also purchase additional plugin apps that add functionality that isn't required or even useful for most people. And finally, they have a cloud plugin app to let you backup your data, you can pay for their cloud subscription which is $2.99 a year, but you can also just use other cloud for storage like Google drive.
But if the server side element is just cloud storage, you should be able to supply your own server.
Then the dev needs to build out a range of protocols and API's to enable users to "supply their own server", which can bring a range of additional headaches, like having to provide support for external dependencies outside their control, etc.
What if the users "server" fails? Should the dev waste hours of their life assisting a user with a highly specific Google Drive issue when they spent $5, 3 years ago?
I mean, there are pretty standard protocols for most of the cloud services, like S3 API - the defacto.
Hell, sftp is fine for most stuff. They just want your data.
But the developer doesn’t need to provide support if you opt to use your own data storage and the storage itself fails. And
Google would be the one to contact if Google drive has an issue.
Well yes, but that's not how your average user thinks and acts. They will either a) contact you as the developer of the app that doesn't seem to work and when your say it's not your fault give you bad reviews or b) directly give you bad reviews.
If you're developing an app that has you provide your own backend then I don't think you'll be getting many average users.
You could also hide it in advanced settings to weed out those unwilling to learn and offer users a fee to use your server.
Ultimately the only reason I can think of not wanting people to self host is because you want to make money off having people's data.
The average user doesn't work like that, also an average user does not always think he is average. There are many people thinking they are advanced, because they know where settings in Windows or Android are located. You will probably get bad reviews then emails, because quote "your app doesn't work". This comment is based on real experiences with Google Play Store and its users, thinking they know what they do.
You clearly haven't dealt with the "average user". Get ready for a boatload of idiots who followed some crappy tutorial for "how to get it for free" making a problem for support or review bombing the app when they lose all their data through incompetence.
I'm not putting my data up some random server run by some dev
Your commenting here is evidence to the contrary
That's my public posts, not my private data.
But why do that?
You're... Confused why software can require server side features?
Yeah. Not talking about providing a service, that's a different animal (my e-mail provider does it as a hobby on donations). But if you have control over the software and you make it open source anyway, why not make it selfhostable instead? An app bound to a service out of the users control is something with a short live...
For one, lots of software just flat out isn't open source. And plenty of it is far from short lived
Right, i was in a os thread before, my bad. But even then, why have the software run on your server if you can have it in the app? Only reason i see is to bind customers, which you do when you have a business model/income anyway.
For one, things like cloud storage are obviously not particularly viable to have the customer host themselves, on premise.
Secondly, some things can be extremely intensive to process, and thus performed on specialized, high end hardware rather than over hours on whatever shit phone the customer is using
Downvote instead of answer, nice.
I think people don't understand your question, or think it might be sarcastic. So to answer your question: server storage and computation power costs money. Depending on how your app's backend works, this can be cheap or very, very expensive, paid monthly or yearly. It also needs to scale with the number of your clients actively using the backend. Some of us just sit on the costs to give its users a free and ad-less experience with more functions without taking any money (by the thought "I pay for this server anyways, so why not share it"). But it costs me more, if I have more active users and I have to actively compensate this.
But there are also some greedy bastards, taking much more thinking to get rich with a single app (actually met one of this devs)