WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

> people would never pay for software.

I see this and not see this.

See this = friend wants to check out app but it costs $1-$3. I'm like, that's less than a coffee or a candy bar that you consume disposably. Why not just try it and if it's sucks throw it away, the same way you might with a new food item? That argument doesn't work on them for some reason.

not see = Steam

Also, do people not pay for it because there are still so many free competing services?

If everything goes the way of ads and (for lack of a better term) enshittification, could consumer attitudes change?

>Why not just try it and if it's sucks throw it away, the same way you might with a new food item? That argument doesn't work on them for some reason.

Even mediocre food is still functional, and usually still enjoyable.

Quite a lot of paid software does not meet that bar. It's far more likely to both cost you money and waste a few hours (much longer than that food demanded, unless you got food poisoning).

I generally agree it's far out of balance, but I do think it's broadly understandable.

> Even mediocre food is still functional, and usually still enjoyable.

That's not even remotely close to being true. Plenty of people would order a $25 dish at a place and not like it. Not finishing the dish, or throwing a way a half eaten candy bar or bad-tasting-$6-cup of coffee is very normal. Plenty of (if most) food is meh or not enjoyable. It just serves a purpose and fills you and you move on.

If you're routinely buying and throwing out $25 plates of food, then you're in a different income bracket than many people. And then, yes, avoiding a $3 app is more nonsensical than for most.

No one said you’re routinely doing it. It just happens for thing at orders of magnitude higher than what can be asked for software. One bad coffee, or meal or a %20 tip on a $40 order of pizza is far more than the 1.99 or 3.99 software can ask for, and it’s still too much. Tipping $5 or a $10 is not a big deal, but a $1.99 app is like “ooof, is there like a free version?”

It’s not even a blanket statement on software. gamers have shown they are willing to pay, though their money comes with strings attached. Mac users are more willing to pay than Windows users who are more willing to pay than Linux users.

Yeah, I'm not claiming nobody pays for software. Clearly many do. Just that I understand people's default aversion - I encounter far more software than food that I would label "shit", despite eating far more food in total.

And software often requires you to enter payment info into who know what system (plus your phone number (plus make an account (plus opt into receiving spam from them until the universe dies))), if you're not using google play / the iOS app store. In a restaurant you put your card into the thing and you're done.

Also this:

>It just serves a purpose and fills you and you move on.

Is something many pieces of software I've used cannot even dream of achieving. They solely wasted my time.

It's why I think it's a shame that demos are a dying breed.

Plenty of university students around me who will order a $8 boba tea and be disappointed that the boba is cooked poorly or the milk ratio isn't good, and then do it again a couple days later.

But the difference is that food elicits cravings - you buy it because you imagine how good it'll be if it's done right this time and your body pressures you to buy it. Apps don't do that.

There is a market for paid software services with a promise of not enshittifying. Kagi and Fastmail are two examples.

Now, this market probably isn’t going to put you in the Fortune 500, but is enough to run a profitable business.

I can't speak for others, but it is absolutely true for me. If I spend $1-3 on some item of food and it is so bad I can't or don't want to even eat it- it is pretty bad... and I am incredibly bummed out over it.

Thanks to Australian customer protection laws, Steam has some of the most lenient refund policies among digital software stores. You can usually get a full refund if your play time is less than a few hours. Plus there are frequent sales. Don’t underestimate the psychological impact of making people feel “I have to buy this now or the deal will be gone.”

I genuinely do not know how to get a refund from the google play store or the apple equivalent.

(The downside of the Steam policy is it makes Steam unviable for games that can be played in full very quickly. Develops can also game the system by dragging out early game so the player is over the refundable time by the time they reach the rough parts. But this is for another discussion.)

I think it is because humans spent thousands, tens of thousands of years not doing much other than searching for food and trading one physical object for another physical object.

The idea of trading something valuable for an abstract piece of software or paper is still not really natural to us, and is a learned behavior.

I buy almost everything with a piece of plastic that represents a company who's agreed to lend me money that represents absolutely nothing except the common agreement that it's valuable.

Yes and credit cards are a learned behavior, not an instinctual thing - and I think not buying an app for $1 is largely based on instinct.

this probably goes back to the Steam counterexample - Game apps do elicit that craving.

There's no problem getting a refund for apps in my experience, I've done it a handful of times when I've changed my mind and it was easy and fully automated.

People instinctively or factually know that there are other apps that do basically the same thing for free.

It's the case for messaging apps and for almost any other kind of app. It's hard to beat the price point of a free app, even if it might include tracking, advertising, spying inside their package.

If WhatsApp would start asking for money hundreds of millions of people would switch to something else in a few days, even to a free app created overnight to capitalize on the opportunity.

> Thanks to Australian customer protection laws

Source? I always thought this was a general Steam policy, as it's available pretty much anywhere.

> Thanks to Australian customer protection laws, Steam has some of the most lenient refund policies among digital software stores. You can usually get a full refund if your play time is less than a few hours.

I think it’s actually worldwide?

Yes, but they did it because Australia forced them to.

Maybe one of the reasons is that buying software in general case is more complicated. Kebab around the corner does not ask you for credit card details, delivery address, probably will not want to track what you will be doing while digesting the kebab etc… In contrast buying a CD in 90’s was more like buying a food, but the price usually was too high. That grown into huge pirate software markets, like in eastern Europe. To extents like the other commenter said - “nobody ever will pay for software”.

    > Plenty of university students around me who will order a $8 boba tea

Is this "University of Monaco" (I jest) or UCLA or USC or Harvard or what? What kind of normie uni student is buying 8 USD bubble teas? Ridiculous.

I doubt that, EU consumer rights already stated that "the consumer shall have a period of 14 days to withdraw from a distance or off-premises contract". Steam purchases count as "digital content" in that case.

[0]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2011/83/oj#art_9.tit_1

Got a source for that?

>What kind of normie uni student is buying 8 USD bubble teas? Ridiculous.

I can't speak to anywhere else, but these[0][1] are near Columbia University and $8 is pretty normal there, AFAICT. Presumably YMMV depending on where you are.

[0] https://order.gongchausa.com/

[1] https://www.trycaviar.com/store/tea-magic-new-york-841338/11...

I think it depends on the demographic.

I still see a lot of people who are afraid of purchasing on the internet and give out their card number. My mother in law ask her daughters to call her a uber when she needs one because she is afraid of installing the app and giving her credit card number[1]. Yet she has all the social medias installed on her smartphone.

[1] The irony is she apparently don't care the her own daughters would have to take that risk for her.

The ACCC did win a $3M AUD judgement against them for their refund policies:

* https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million... (not currently loading for me)

* https://archive.is/9mE7i#selection-4964.0-4978.0 (archive of the above)

> The Court held that the terms and conditions in the Steam subscriber agreements, and Steam’s refund policies, included false or misleading representations about consumers’ rights to obtain a refund for games if they were not of acceptable quality.

> In determining the appropriate penalty to impose on Valve, Justice Edelman noted that “even if a very small percentage of Valve’s consumers had read the misrepresentations then this might have involved hundreds, possibly thousands, of consumers being affected”.

> Justice Edelman also took into account “Valve’s culture of compliance [which] was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.

Valve's notice to consumers is archived here, and no longer on their live website: https://web.archive.org/web/20180427063845/https://store.ste...

I can find news articles saying that the court action began in late Aug/early Sep 2014.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/steamowner-v...

Here's an old reddit comment discussing how Valve failed to implement AUD and KRW pricing on schedule, and speculates that at least in Australia's case, it's because of local compliance reasons.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/38dlvd/the_real_reas...

But I can't find anything that definitively ties the rollout of refund policies to an attempt to get the ACCC off their back. The comments on the above reddit post show that GOG and Origin had active refund policies at this time.

I got one from the play store once - I called them. The conversation was a bit surreal ( they kept telling me it wasn’t their fault , before eventually suggesting a refund )

IMO the problem of many platforms is that they don't let you "own" the software (whatever that means).

Steam experience is closer to the feel of ownership because: - Most games don't just randomly upgrade. They are stable. - Steam is cross platform enough that you can use the software on different devices as if you were copying it. - Your steam account isn't the center of your digital life, it's access isn't subject to many associated risks.

Sony does not follow this, how are they getting away with it?

On the other hand paying for service is the oldest profession going

They got sued (and lost) back in 2014 in Australia for not having a refund policy: https://www.techradar.com/news/heres-valves-official-stateme...

My point is, this is just something Steam does, not something they are required to do (at least not everywhere).

Yep and the success of SAAS compared to low cost, buy it once software (like apps) is a testament to that.

I don’t buy that justification, most people have never and will never spare a thought for “software ownership”. I’d bet the truth is closer to “people don’t see games as software, but as entertainment. Paying for them is no different to paying to go to the movies, buy a song on iTunes, use Spotify, or Netflix”.

Apps (“software”) and games are fundamentally different in the public’s perception. Look at the App Store, it has two different tabs for games and Apple is even making a separate app for them.

The accumulated loss, if some people lost their access to Steam is huge though. For some people that's thousands of euros.

> You can usually get a full refund if your play time is less than a few hours.

The explicit rule is you can get a refund on any game for any reason if both of these are true:

* You have played for less than two hours.

* You bought it in the past two weeks.

https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/

Anecdotally, as a counterpoint, I asked for refunds on the iOS App Store maybe twice in a row and since then every purchase was met with a dialog where I had to confirm I waved my right to a refund.

This was over a decade ago, so may be very outdated. I don’t even think in-app purchases were yet a thing. I wasn’t trying to abuse the apps (I pay for software) and was in fact trying to use the refund policy to allow me to buy more apps because I could test without the fear of paying for duds. Their policy had the opposite effect and I basically stopped buying on the App Store.

In practice I've sometimes encountered that in the form of "either waive your right of withdrawal or else wait 14 days to download your content/activate your licence/etc.", though.

In my experience, a free and ad-free app is often better, because it was written by someone who doesn't have profit as a motive (often just a hobby). There are tons of great paid apps too, but it's hard to know which paid app is actually good and which is a slipshod app designed to profit from the rare user who will buy an app without much thought.

This is not true for digital purchases when you waive your rights to withdraw which you have to accept for digital storefronts. See under point 19).

Ok, so my joke stands. Columbia University is in Manhattan -- incredibly expensive by any measure.

Just for clarification: they are required to refund customers in some jurisdictions (apparently Australia was the reason, indeed), so they might have decided to do this for everybody

a) out of the kindness of their heart (i.e. good public image), or

b) just not to deal with complexity of introducing different refund schemas per region.

Probably a mixture of both.

I don’t think that would fly in any EU court?

People aren't willing to pay for mobile games any more than for other apps.

Also

c) to preempt additional regulation in more jurisdictions

Steams refund policies are still fairly weak IMO. For many games, two hours doesn't really tell you much about the quality of the game and Steam also knows that many users will not get around to even trying games they pick up within the two weeks that they grant refunds for.

Imagine you went to a physical store and bought something that turned out to be broken after a couple hours of use and the Store just said too bad. Absolutely unacceptable there but Steam reserves the right to and does often refuse refunds that are not within their stated limits.

You also don't have as much leverage with Steam as you do with some random store. If a merchant fucks you over you are supposed to be able to reverse the transaction but with Steam trying that with even one game will get you banned from the store completely - and with Steam being a not-quite monopoly that means many games will literally be unavailable to you.

AFAIK you also still cant refund Steam wallet "cash" into real money so if you bought a Steam wallet card in order to buy a Game and then want to refund that game you can effectively only exchange it for other Steam products which is not a real refund.

IMO Steam gets a lot of undue credit just for not being quite as terrible as the competition.

You can doubt whatever you want but the fact is Steam did NOT offer refunds until they were sued in Australia and lost.

As for EU consumer rights, look at Article 16 (m) in the link you posted:

> Exceptions from the right of withdrawal

> Member States shall not provide for the right of withdrawal set out in Articles 9 to 15 in respect of distance and off-premises contracts as regards the following:

> [...]

> (m) the supply of digital content which is not supplied on a tangible medium if the performance has begun with the consumer’s prior express consent and his acknowledgment that he thereby loses his right of withdrawal.

It would and does. There is little (EU-wide) legal protection for consumers of digital content.

> [1] The irony is she apparently don't care the her own daughters would have to take that risk for her.

That's not a fair assessment. Maybe she simply thinks heir daughter will be better at not getting scammed and she could very well be right about that.

The problem is that there is also tons of services that promised not to enshittify but then changed their minds when they thought that fucking over their users would be more profitable. That includes even Google, look up their early views on ads. Because of this those promises are often (IMO rightfully) ignored as hot air. The only way to ensure that your software doesn't get enshittified is to legally guarantee that you are not dependent on a single vendor for future development - the most effective way to do that is insist on open source software.

It’s curious that you had to specify mobile games. That seems to indicate you understand those are their own class of product (often more slot machine with extra steps than software or game) than what the conversation is about (Steam, thus desktop games).

The App Store—which, by the way, I was thinking of the one on the Mac—was merely an example to represent how companies understand and separate games from other software. I could’ve also made the point of games being seen as entertainment rather than software by pointing out Netflix has movies, TV shows, and games, but not other apps.

Yeah I love open source. Daily Linux desktop user and open source code contributor here.

Open source doesn’t solve the problem “I need to be able to search the entire internet for a document.” Even “I want to safely receive email” is a challenge to do with open source software. At some point I need to use software as a service, and at that point I’d prefer to give money to the service directly than having the service target advertising at me.

That's not the only way. Wikipedia has avoided it through a non-profit, donation and volunteer based structure.

Even here in Barcelona a bubble tea is about 6 euro. It's not something I'd get every day, but it's a nice thing on a hot day. A treat like an ice cream.

And the purchasing power in America is about 3-4 times as high. Also, you don't really get poor students there. If you're poor in America you just don't get to go to college.

    > And the purchasing power in America is about 3-4 times as high.

The median income in Barcelona ~34K EUR per year. The median income in New York City is ~42K USD per year.

    > If you're poor in America you just don't get to go to college.

What? Who told you that? This is untrue. There are lots of grants (free money) and loans available to low income students. Also, the university system in the US is much less rigid than Spain. In the US, many lower income people will first attend community college to get a two years associate's degree. Then, start a job, and attend night school at a university for another 3-4 years to get an undergraduate degree.

It’s also easier to pay for something that I feel I’m entirely getting as a treat for me. Sure, that snack is $5, but it’s all a “treat”. Software often doesn’t feel like a treat to own, outside of games that is, having to pay for apps you’d just use in every day life feels emotionally more like an annoying tax you have to pay to just continue existing, just like an electricity bill or something. I honestly think that’s the main psychological difference that people aren’t considering or even mentioning.