Subscription models only make sense for an app/service that have recurring costs. In the case of Lemmy apps, the instances are the ones with recurring hosting costs, not the apps.
If an app doesn’t have recurring hosting costs, it only makes sense to have one up front payment and then maybe in app purchases to pay for new features going forward
I get the distinct impression that everyone removed about the fees are people that have never had to develop for end users and maintain the fucking thing.
Yep, and it’s even worse for mobile apps because people are so used to the terrible dollar-per-app model, despite the fact that these mobile apps are actually THE software they use everyday.
Apple and Google don’t care, they get 30% cut regardless whether the dev makes $100 / sale or $1 / sale at higher volume. But it was a good strategy to shift the power over to the iOS and Android platforms because the perception is, dollar-per-app devs can’t be that important, right? And they’ll never get too big.