Apple allows in-app purchases for free apps

[panamajack]

Hey Mike,

How do you feel about this? If you were to release a free crippled "lite" version of Pleco to entice new customers, what would such an app look like?


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http://www.marco.org/214082853

From Apple, via a developer mass-mail:

Now you can use In App Purchase in your free apps to sell content, subscriptions, and digital services.

You can also simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses In App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app. Using In App Purchase in your app can also help combat some of the problems of software piracy by allowing you to verify In App Purchases.

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[mikelove]

We're definitely doing this, in fact we delayed the beta for a few days while we rejigger a couple of things in the app to accommodate it. What features it might include have a lot to do with Apple; will they, for example, let us offer some sort of a handwriting "test pad" as on Palm/WM so that people can try out our fabulous full-screen handwriting recognizer, or will they consider that too demo-ish.

 

[mikelove]

Another benefit of this is that it makes it easier for us to adopt the two-version approach I mentioned earlier; release one free product with only a minimal set of data files and the others downloadable separately, then release another more bloated one with all 500+ MB built-in; if they're free then it's really no trouble to switch between them.