Oh, that does seem like a little glimmer of hope. I really hope they are working on addressing this issue as well.

But … I also think that some of the phrases like 'most of this nonsense is being driven by users' that are being thrown around by some devs are not helping matters. Last I looked, users are your customers, or potential customers. Listening to your customers when they have views on pricing, upgrades, desired new features, and so on strikes me as an essential part of achieving success. Are you going to agree with all users' views, or be able to keep everyone happy? Probably not. But throwing around phrases that sound full of contempt for users seems a bad idea to me.

As your own interview established, Loren has no way to do upgrades with the current state of the App Store, so your response is completely redundant.

Not only that, the majority of games don't offer upgrades and cost significantly more than Tweetie and people happily pay for these. The other apps typically cost 100s if not 1000s of dollars and therefore it's reasonable upgrade pricing is necessary in order to keep users on current versions.

Loren spent likely 100s of hours practically rewriting this app, and clearly we are getting something that is significantly different and by the looks of it vastly improved. It's pretty simple for those that don't think so – simply don't buy it. Why is it so hard to grasp that Loren be compensated for their work?

I really can't believe people are complaining over having to pay for an app that costs less than a cup of tea or coffee or barely more than a can of drink at a vending machine.

Resubmitting every time a bug fix / update is needed sounds less than ideal to me. The renaming idea might be a good thing, and certainly a clear section in the description pointing to the other, newer app would be helpful.

Good point. If he did pull it from the store, and then needed to push an urgent update, he could just resubmit it, but he might also leave it in the store to begin with, but update the description and possibly rename it to something like "Tweetie Classic" to ensure that people know it's the older version. It's not his fault if they don't take the time to read the description before purchasing the app, though.

If the original app is pulled from the store how do users of it get the promised future updates for it? (e.g if Twitter makes a change that breaks something in Tweetie V1)

If Loren decides to offer them, it's not as simple as telling his application to do it. He would have to purchase a hosted server, set up a service to handle the push notifications there, and tie the app into that. Then, that server would have to constantly be checking EVERY SINGLE USER'S PROFILE that uses Tweetie and has Push enabled, which could easily be thousands of users, and sending a notification every single time they recieve a new tweet.

I don't know about the average user, but I get a good number of tweets (usually at least 20) every single time my client refreshes, and I'm not following that many people. So you can just imagine the volume with users that have thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of followers. Multiply that by the number of users on Tweetie, and you've got a LOT of work that has to be done, constantly, to ensure that notifications are delivered as quickly as possible.

All of that requires bandwidth, and bandwidth is NOT cheap. In order to provide something like that, Loren would most likely have to have multiple servers handling the load, and be paying a significant amount of recurring monthly costs to cover the hosting and bandwith for such an endeavor. We are talking hundreds, if not thousands of dollars every month to be able to provide users with instant notification of tweets.

Doesn't sound so easy now, does it?

So, would you call upgrades to other desktop software 'shenanigans' as well? People pay upwards of $100 or more to upgrade things like OS X itself, iWork, iLife, MS Office, and even more for the Adobe products. Even on smaller applications, most of the time you can expect to pay for major versions of the app, regardless of how much has actually changed.

In this case, though, you're paying $3. Not $60, $80, $100 or more for anything else, but just simply $3 to support the work of a single developer who has vested a lot of his own time into making an application that he hopes people will love.

I wouldn't say Tweetie 1 is 'dead'. Loren has already said he will support it for the foreseeable future, and will update it if Twitter makes any significant changes that will prevent it from working. He's just not going to add any new features to it, which is fine, since there is no requirement for him to do so. You know what features an app has when you purchase it, you shouldn't expect to receive new functionality for free beyond that. I'm sure he will probably pull the original one from the store so that new users will only find the new one, while existing users can keep using the current version. Developers can remove an app from the App Store without affecting people who have already purchased it.

At any rate, this is far from a 'stunt'. This is a developer who wrote a great Twitter application, and has seen success with it. It has lots of users who love it. He has maintained it with updates as necessary, but now he has come up with some new and better ways of doing things, a lot of new ideas he wanted to implement, and he has taken the time to put all of these ideas down and make a new product, and he's offering that new product as an option for those who want it. You can't expect him to just sell the original version and never expect any payment for additional work he puts into the app, unless you want him to eventually have no reason to continue working on it, as he would not be getting anything out of it beyond users demanding more features and more functionality for nothing.

Thanks – it gave me lots of food for thought.

I hope Apple does something soon to give devs more options, and to get this sorted.

And what about the non-technical people who read about Tweetie and go to download Tweetie 1 not understanding that it's essentially dead and that they should have bought Tweetie 2.

Not drinking this Kool Aid — and I think Apple will very quickly come out with a policy to stop these shenanigans. They won't allow the App store to be clutter with a bunch of abandoned early versions of essentially the same application.

Thanks – and hope it will help the discussion.

Thanks – and hope ti will help the discussion.

Thanks very much for the kind words.

Thanks Ramesh. I think Loren provided some very good, and thorough, answers.

Hi Gary. Thanks. I've never been that fussed about push, for almost any app, and I do reckon there are enough good options like Boxcar out there to make this probably not a dealbreaker for many folks. Just my .02. Hope you're doing well mate.