1748
submitted 11 months ago by kpw@kbin.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] poopkins@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago

Lovely, so your rebuttal is that not only is my emotion wrong but my software sucks, too. I would suggest putting yourself in my shoes and envisioning what a shitty thing that is to say.

To offer a bit of background: the clone my game published itself on Google Play with ads removed. Aside from simply the confusion of a game with verbatim the same name, this further entices users to install it, because Google Play displays a label when an app contains ads.

What is the worth to a user? This is a terrific question, and I have spent years narrowing down the right valuation of ad content and in-app purchase pricing to remove ads. The game currently has 15M historical installs with fairly industry standard retention rates, so it can't be completely off. But the thing is, that valuation will always be higher than 0.

So where does the steal come from? The cloned app only offered the ad-free experience long enough to gather enough installs, to then revert the change with a swapped out AdMob account number.

I think most of this has been offset by that change now as I've seen a similar growth return to my app. But those losses in the interim period are gone forever. Somebody took my code base, republished it in blatant violation of GPL, causing me to lose revenue. I feel robbed and your apathy genuinely perplexes me.

this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
1748 points (96.8% liked)

Technology

59670 readers
1495 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS