The pivot towards subscriptions

[kirk781]

Whilst a lot of services/apps across all platforms have pivoted towards the subscription model [some with some valid model and some with having no basis altogether]; is the future curving towards the latter for Android [or all OS's in general]?

What piqued my interest in General was a third party app called Stats.fm for Spotify. It's basically a fancy version of Last.fm but only for Spotify. I once had purchased a one time license [cheap] for it couple of years ago for it but when I installed it again today; found out they had turned towards a subscription model. Why does a company that has little need for the cloud need a subscription thing? And the real kicker was that a music tracker for Spotify was more expensive than any music streaming service I had encountered. Spotify usually costs for 1,200 INR / year in my country [though currently at a discount it was doing for 500 INR per year]. This music tracking service, tied to a music streaming service, costed 750 INR for 6 months.

That's almost as expensive as YT Premium and atleast Google has to host terabytes of videos. What excuse do these folks have? As Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittifcation, it seems the app ecosystem is geared towards that left, right and center.

 

[B. Diddy]

It's all about the bottom line. I think it's appalling that car companies are taking this tack as well and requiring subscriptions for certain features.

 

[notforhire]

It's all about the bottom line. I think it's appalling that car companies are taking this tack as well and requiring subscriptions for certain features.

my "smart" truck (2015) became a beautiful dumb truck once 2G was killed off. I could not be more pleased.