Free to freemium to paid apps

When the worlds richest man Elon Musk bought Twitter on 27Th October the Twitteratis (frequent users of Twitter) were expecting some additional features which will make Twitter even more fun , but Elon decided to become richer and brought in a paid ( 8$ a month) feature, and then the trouble started. Now its facing bankruptcy (see image below).

MY FIRST PAID APP EXPERIENCE

I was a user of Hotmail a popular Email service ???of??late ??90s ??and ??early 2000s ?( Hotmail was owned by Sabeer Bhatia an Indian American see image below ) ?Hotmail was later sold to Microsoft for about 500 million US$ ( one of the biggest tech deals of those times) ?Hotmail did bring out a paid version of the Email service ( $1 a month) ?quickly people started abandoning it and Yahoo and?Gmail took over the space and Hotmail disappeared. When Twitter was free to use it made money and when they began to charge Twitter is facing trouble, what a paradoxical situation.

There are 5.5miilion apps in the apps store with about 98% of them free to use, there is a famous saying in the tech world?If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. Meaning when we register in these apps and start using them, we do give out data about ourselves, these apps sell our data to push advertisements on top the page you are browsing and make money out of it. (recall advertisements popping up in Facebook). Google and Amazon keep a track of all what you do on the net and monetize it This joke below is true in a way

HOW DOES THE APP STORE WORK

Apple or Google has simply created a platform for you to create an app and list it on them to be viewed and used by the millions of visitors to their stores. The service fee is 15% of your earning for the first 1 million of your earning and subsequently its 30% This way it gives smaller developers ?help as they scale their business. Google and Apple are literally dominating this market

MANY MORE STORES

Some of the competitors of these two are ?such as?APKMirror, Amazon Appstore, F-Droid, GetJar, SlideMe, AppBrain, GetAPK, well the game here is just like the popularity of a ?mall in your city. China?natures its own ecosystems and some of the app store in China?are Tencent App Store,?Qihoo 360 App Store,?Xiaomi App Store. I strongly believe that Jio will launch a store which will be more India centric and cheaper than Google and Apple.

WHY APPS FAIL

You may be surprised to know that about 96% of all the apps fail because performance issues ( slow or lagging), too long registration process, no traffic ,features that are difficult to access , poor memory management, inadequate testing because of glitches and getting stuck. Thousands of?new apps go live every day, driven by the high market demand for new content and functionality. But that high volume means lots of competition, which makes it harder for even good app to survive.

CONCLUSION

Historically it’s the free app that has made the money and many paid apps have disappeared , now comes the hybrid type the FREEMIUM, a business model, ?whereby basic services are provided free of charge while more advanced features must be paid for a trick that’s paying off.