Wish there was a way to send this to every mobile dev who thinks they can (and should) charge a subscription for their hobby app that provides a basic function
Remeber to include the link to your alternate ios app store that you somehow got Apple to allow on everyone's devices, where you don't charge every developer a subscription just to exist. Even Google is 99 44/100 of the way to the same thing.
This is something I hope agentic coding helps to solve. It really just takes a few people annoyed enough with this problem to go out and start churning out truly free stuff like this so that the cash-grab apps can die.
I have already written a few tools for myself that I use in my homelab, and I plan to give them away. I've made stuff that, a few years ago, had I developed from the ground up, I would be far more interested in monetizing. But why bother now that I know that anyone with a coding agent can make a copy of it in an afternoon?
I was thinking about this recently. I was gonna try an experiment where I make AGPL apps, release the source code ofc, but then published a 1-5$ version on the Google play store. There's the compiled version if you want, pay a couple bucks. If not, you're free to compile and sideload on your own.
Seems fair enough, similar to self hosted software that offers managed hosting for a price, or you can try to run the docker containers on your own or whatever. I do a bit of both, self host the non critical stuff, pay for the critical stuff.
