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I understand some people are against subscriptions because they want to feel a sense of ownership.

Yep that's exactly it.

Wait, no I don’t. I’m honestly not sure what that means. You can’t take Cal.ai and Flighty out of your phone and put them on your shelf. These things are only going to work as long as they’re maintained and updated. It’s not 1995 anymore.

And that's the problem. It's not necessarily that subscriptions are bad, but what they enable or discourage. I want to buy things. I don't want to rent things. The thing I want is now only available for rent because the producer realized they could extract more money that way. Sometimes it's a physical thing that's only available for rent and that's even worse.

Okay, maybe ownership isn’t possible, but I just want a one-time purchase, you might say. Maybe for budgeting purposes you don’t want to lock in future obligations. And I guess I can understand that, but I can’t help feeling like you have in mind that this one-time purchase is going to be $5 total. And I’m here to tell you that’s not happening. For anything that takes effort it’s going to be more like $200. And if you’re throwing a fit over $5/month you’re probably not going to shell out $200.

That's fine, give me the choice. I've bought lifetime subscriptions before and am happy with most of them.

Even if you’re willing to pay that, it seems like a bad deal for you. You paid $200 up front and I can disappear next month.

That is often a risk I'm willing to (and have) take.

Okay, okay, but this app doesn’t have a backend, and it’s actually already perfect and never needs to change at all. So why can’t I just pay this one time and use it forever?” Hmm, you really love this iPhone app so much, but you want it to look like iOS 15 forever?

Dude, people still run XP. Dumb take, stupid dev.

You don’t want it to support Liquid Glass?

Correct

I think you do

I don't. It's ugly, hurts visibility, clutters the design. And all for what? So that I can pretend I'm looking at the world through a beer bottle? L take. Just cause you think Apple is right in assuming people want bad designs doesn't mean they are.

APIs get deprecated. Crashes come up on new OS versions.

And the OS should provide compat layers to preserve accesses to the things we buy.

You’re not going to convince me subscription is the wrong model even for an offline app.

That's apparent. Could it be that your paycheck depends upon people using subscriptions?

You’re wrong. The business model is correct.

You're wrong. Rampant rent seeking behavior for fucking everything in life is not good or correct. This is blatant capitalist pill BS. I want devs to have their needs met, same as everyone, so that they can engage with their craft with dignity and that the outcome of their labor can be a benefit to all society.