I'm not sure what the mental block is for people. A $5 app is considered premium, and that's what plenty of people spend on coffee on their way to work every day.
I hear this all the time, like somehow the only factor in the propositions is economic.
When someone spends $5 on coffee, they know exactly what they are getting, it’s a regular purchase, produced by a formulaic method, with consistent quality, that energises them for the day ... that also hooks into their biochemistry and there’s a certain about of conditioning / addictive behaviour there too.
Compare that to the purchase of an app. There’s no biochemical enhancement, the quality of apps varies wildly and is unpredictable until after purchase, there’s little / no ability to refund. There’s no addictive hook to buy an app (I know some apps are addictive - that’s different)
How are those propositions even nearly close? The decision to purchase is not purely economic.
I think this hits close to home for a lot of people. It's not about the small amount of money to pay for the app, mostly what stops me is that I don't know what I'm getting for that $5. It feels like I'm potentially throwing money down the drain.
I've also paid for games apps (the most was around $20, I would pay more). I'd like to pay "premium" $ for a premium product on the app store, but I generally don't see that as an option. Periodically, I'll glance at the games available on the iOS store and the quality is night and day compared to PC/console.
Maybe people think apps are not worth buying because they're charging pennies? What happened to making a solid product and not being afraid to charge for it?
I'm not sure there's so much overlap between those 2 groups.
I don't buy 5$ apps and I also don't buy 5$ coffees.
Also I notice that I hardly ever use the apps I test (why do I even have this smartphone?) so the coffee would absolutely bring much more joy than the app, in 90% of the time - and that's from someone who doesn't regularly consume coffee outside of home and office (i.e. relatively cheap)
On average, I might have to buy 4 apps and spend 15 minutes fiddling around with each to find one I like in that category. So that's $20 plus an hour of my time. The good apps basically have to subsidize all the crap.
