this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Sync for Lemmy
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I understand the sentiment. Most devs that release Lemmy apps do so as a side projects. They don't make money doing it. In fact, they actually losing money and time to work on their side projects. It's actually amazing how many apps we now have in just a short time.
That being said, Sync developer is one of a few dev who work on a lemmy app full time. This results in higher quality app, even though it's still in beta right now. But since he's literally doing this for a living, he'll need to make some money to continue his work. People was begging for him to make an app for Lemmy, and he actually does it. Whether he'll continue doing this or not will depends on whether he can make a living or not. And since the market for Lemmy apps is so small, there is no other choice but to charge a higher price to make the calculus works. For a lot of people that rooting for him, paying $20 or $17/year is no brainer if it means they get to have their favorite app working on Lemmy.
Sync isn't the type of app that needs to be worked on full time. It's an alternate interface of an existing website.
This price is too steep and I will either wait for it to go down or switch to another app when they become more full featured.
So I guess any new updates and features will just release on their own, huh?
The thing that set Sync and Apollo apart from a horde of other 3rd party reddit client apps was due to both dev was working full time on their app, and the quality of those apps prove it. The sync dev has been working full time on lemmy app in the past few weeks, and we can already see how good the app is compared o other lemmy apps.
If Apollo dev were also making a lemmy app, the price would be more or less the same simply due to small lemmy user base. The economy of scale simply is not there yet. The only way those devs can lower the price and still be able to sustain themselves is if lemmy gain a whole lot more total active users.
I'm not saying there is no other choice. Lemmy core devs are paid by a grant to work on Lemmy full time for example. Other apps developers may have a different funding model (donation, or even out of their own pocket), but for Sync, the dev is a commercial app developer so he does what he do best: making a paid app.
How come selling an app is a leech when many people found his app valuable?