There is a non-subscription, licence-purchase model. They basically obfuscate it, (ok: kinder is "don't market it strongly") But there IS a licence model.
So mainly, the issue is how "hard" they make it to find. That, and the 'dont be evil, but hey, we changed our minds a bit' aspect to what was said in the past and now emerges.
The APP store doesn't help, but I think its ass-backwards to use that to "sell" the subscription model. Honestly? I could come into this now and not care, but as a licence holder, the way its being done irks me.
Just make it easier to find the licence option on the web page and in your apps, and I'll be good.
Making it easier to find is a double edged sword and the reason why it's harder to find now.
If we make it easy to find it will cause confusion for users about which to get. When we did this in the past we had a lot of users who thought they had to have both and as such would purchase both. This led to a lot of refunds on our part and explanation for which they should get.
Turns out most users are perfectly happy and will benefit greatly from the subscription side. This site and a couple of other places being the exception to this as many of you seem to prefer licenses which means this aggravates you all, but for the average person the benefit greatly from the subscription side and it's the one they often choose when we explain the benefits of each.
So making it easier to find puts that problem back on the table and quite frankly, it's something I'd really personally rather not deal with like before. It's easy to say differently until you have hundreds of users at any given time looking for help with what to buy or you accidentally find out they purchased both while helping them with some other unrelated thing.
The Mac App Store makes sense for subscriptions though. They will always have access to the latest version so long as the subscription is active, so we don't have to deal with upgrade pricing there.
For license users though it's not as clear cut. We can either issue a new app each time but we can't advertise the new version in the old version (rules) and this will end up with a lot of users not knowing there's a new version out. Subscription users will also have to upgrade manually each time and that's not convenient for them at all given they're entitled to that new version as part of their subscription.
We're trying to make it easy, though it's going to be difficult this time because we do have to get license users to switch entirely to our direct download version.
Once this is done though, subscription users can use either or, whichever they want.
License users will always use our direct download version.
When an upgrade comes out our subscription users will always be upgraded to the latest version without issues. Our license users will be prompted to upgrade or be informed of the upgrade in some way.
This is how it should work, unfortunately it was not possible to do this for the Mac App Store so we had to make changes there. Perhaps things change with the Mac App Store in the future and we can bring back both, but for now, this new method we're using provides the best user experience for both sides, once the switch is made.
I'll be the first to admit I hate removing choice from the equation here, and I hate that we have to get users to do work in the first place. But sometimes there are things outside of your ability to control and this is one of them for us.
Hope that gives some additional insight that wasn't present in the blog post though.
So mainly, the issue is how "hard" they make it to find. That, and the 'dont be evil, but hey, we changed our minds a bit' aspect to what was said in the past and now emerges.
The APP store doesn't help, but I think its ass-backwards to use that to "sell" the subscription model. Honestly? I could come into this now and not care, but as a licence holder, the way its being done irks me.
Just make it easier to find the licence option on the web page and in your apps, and I'll be good.