Not useless as such but a wallpaper app or something that expects you to pay £5.99 a month to use. Fuck all the way off with that
watch face app, Facer I think is like this. and still bombards you with ads and banners.
Didn’t MKBHD launch some wallpaper app for $12 a month? I heard about it and just figured he was another tech YouTuber who lost touch
He did actually do a really good honest apology for that, restructuring pricing and improving on the app, but then he did the thing of the commentor above me, which was worse.
How could you possibly apologize for charging $12 A MONTH for wallpapers!?
“I was trying to be the Netflix for wallpapers.” /s
He then follows up that face plant by getting caught going 85 MPH in a school zone. MKHB is crashing out hard.
Pretty sure he lives in New Jersey, the rest of America doesn’t know he was being passed while in that school zone. Driving is different up there
Near all paid apps on iPhone.
Full price EA games with F2P-style microtransactions and ads
And this isn’t useless, but I can’t believe that to rent Photoshop for $20/mo, your creative projects are not your IP…
to rent Photoshop for $20/mo, your creative projects are not your IP
How is that even legal?
I don’t think that’s true.
They changed their TOS to give them a right to everything you make. https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/06/change-to-adobe-terms-amp-conditions/
Sorry but the same article links to an update that backtracks.
There’s just no way this would ever pass without them losing all their business customers, any legality of such disclaimer aside.I stand corrected. Still though, it shows that they at least wanted to have this happen, which breaks my trust in them.
They probably wanted to sell it as AI training data.
Yes, that’s kind of the point. They wanted to steal every artist that uses their software’s work, and then use it (or sell it) to train AI to put those artists out of work.
It feels like the epitome of “short term profits at the cost of long term gain”. No one’s going to be using your software if you put them out of work. But I guess when you’re a monopoly the only direction to go is down.
I recently tried out an “LED banner” (called LED scroller in the google play store) app that lets you scroll text on your screen. Pretty cool, I would totally pay $5 or maybe even $10 for it. In the free version, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many ads in such a short period of time. The paid version was $15 PER WEEK. That’s $780 per year. To scroll some text. It’s the only app I’ve ever bothered to post a review for.
Sounds like a front for either blatant adware or malware with botted reviews/downloads to bring it to the top in search results. I can’t image there isn’t a free app that does this.
Could it be money laundering?
It’s just a rip off scam.
It’s just fishing. For every 10 users that notice the deceptive “free trial then bills per week” model, there’s a guy who doesn’t notice until he’s been charged $15 and cancels. And for every ten of that guy, there’s a guy that doesn’t notice for a month, and for every ten of that guy there’s the rare whale who looks at their $700/mo “google bill” and goes yeah that sounds about right.
I remember writing one of those using a bitmap font from some Arduino LCD driver program and publishing it for free on the Android store. Someone offered £50 for the source code and I wonder if they’re related.
I remember when the iPhone was new and my friend paid money for an app that simulates a mug of beer on the screen so you can pretend to drink it.
That, but the entire genre of those fucking things cuz there are assloads of them now.
I’ve never really understood the imitation app developers. Like your first little run of the novelty, sure, makes sense, minimal effort that might pay itself off or even go viral, but why do the imitations think they have the same shot?
Novelty apps were practically the majority of what was out there in the early days of Android and iOS. I remember a lighter app, and an electric shaver app.
My favorite novelty app was that marble maze game on iOS that* used the accelerometer. I got really good at finishing those mazes in seconds, which upset my cousin because it was his phone and I demolished all his best times, lol. Only video game I was ever good at.
All the free widgets that used to come preinstalled in Android before Google killed them to save the extra $2 of development cost from their yearly interns.
There used to be an app that was a Dragon Ball Z scouter. You could point it at anything with a face and it would tell you a random power level. Apparently mine is 10,550 (I can barely lift a jug of milk).
Over 9000!!! 😱🤯
utter classic
I don’t know, not the worst in this thread at least.
Until we find out it’s actually a white supremacist thing and OP is just pasty af.
Wdym?
“Power levels” was/is a white supremacist dogwhistle for cryptofascists, as in “Don’t forget to hide your (white) power level.”
You’d see it referenced on their meme communities on Reddit fairly frequently. At least it was when I still had an eye on what cryptofascists were doing, which I have to say is the best part of Lemmy, not constantly seeing cryptofascist things.
With that app, and that in mind, there’s a (completely and mostly jokingly speculative) possibility that it was measuring albedo instead of just randomly assigning numbers. I’m mostly being a miserable cynic bringing it up without evidence tbh.
Bit of context for the power level stuff: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hide-your-power-level
It only became an alt-right thing because it leaked from /a/ to /b/ and to /pol/, but it wasn’t originally alt-right. /w/allpapers always has a “power level” thread running with anime stuff that isn’t immediately obvious to the casual observer.
Oh, that. Worry not, I’m not a white supremacist (not that I could be, I’m half Pacific Islander half Scottish). It seemed to have a very loose definition of a face, like you could point it at a drawing or an animal and it would work the same. I take it that it was programmed to assign a number to how closely something matched anime pareidolia.
There used to be apps in the iOS app store that were nothing but a big “I’m rich” symbol. They would be listed for some shit like $10,000 in the app store and all they did was,at best, have a button that played a sound to indicate that you were in fact rich lol.
Those “I’m rich” apps basically tested the app store price limit which was set to $9,999 (don’t know if it’s different now). Brilliant idea really.
I put this in the same category as the “Million dollar homepage” where some guy asked for $1 a pixel and hosted a page with the results. Something smart that if it gets enough attention could make someone good money for not a lot of work. And generally something that will only work once as copycats won’t be seen to have the same value.
It is expensive, but its not surprising that it costs money
Spotify and apps like it. Imagine paying a subscription to a subpar selection of music when you could just download mp3s. Imagine having skipping a song being a privilege. Are you an abused kid? Is drinking water a privilege too? I paid once for BlackPlayer simply because it’s my favorite music player app. The most important features were free.
I sail the high seas quite often. I also pay for spotify because it’s stupid easy.
It really is a shame that blackplayer is not being updated anymore afaik
I haven’t had any issues with it. I still use it today
Imagine paying a subscription to a subpar selection of music when you could just download mp3s.
Imagine having to go through the hassle of being at a computer and using whatever program you need to use to find the correct songs and then transfering them to your phone, when you could just find the song instantly, no matter where you are.
I used to download tens of thousands of songs back in the day, Spotify is way more convienient, a price I’m perfectly fine paying.
Im with you on this one. I listen to wayyyy too much music to go back to downloading constantly
I forgot I time traveled to 2006. The politics never changed so I thought I was still in 2025.
Anyway in the future we have a thing called cloud storage where you could upload your whole music folder and download it on any device.
As someone who makes music and listens to my own nonsense, I set a onedrive folder as my default location so I can export an mp3 while I’m showering and getting dressed and download the mp3 on my phone when I’m outside.
What if you want to listen to something you didn’t have the foresight to pirate locally first?
Music streaming is very convenient, even easier than piracy.
I agree with you in theory, and in practice for most people. I have weird enough tastes in music though that I haven’t found a single streaming service that has what I want.
There’s an Android port of Soulseek.
I did not know this.
If I like the song, I download it when I have internet or mobile data. I support the creators in other ways if possible. $1 from one fan is the equivalent of like 13 million streams from them. I’m not paying to avoid ten minutes of obnoxious ads every time I want to listen to music. Anyway, they found Like the Wind, and it absolutely slaps so I’ll download it on my phone.
How do you play a novel song on demand? How do you find new music you have ever heard before?
I’ll seek it out when I feel like it. I’m not paying to force myself to sit through stuff I’m not interested in.
Downvoted for hating on Spotify. That’s just sad.
I don’t care what crap Spotify offers; it’s well known they go out of their way to avoid paying royalties to the artists. They’re a leech, nothing more, and I will never support them.
Yeah, on lemmy if you’re not constantly deepthroating Xi Jinping’s cock, you’re practically digesting Spotify’s cock.
Piracy pays them more though?
Sometimes it does. Piracy drives up sales of traditional media (think: vinyl), as well as increasing crowd size at live performances. Also, merch sales scale with awareness of an artist. All of these things equal the payout of millions of plays on spoffy.
Except that using spotify does all of that as well.
I’m not saying that spotify is good. But thinking piracy is better for the artist than spotify is delusional.
I’m delusional, then. Spotify hasn’t paid me a red cent, but piracy has indirectly put money in my pocket and food on my table.
And Spotify hasn’t paid you indirectly?
I down voted them for the weird tirade about privilege and being an abused kid. Idk wtf that has to do with hating spotify, but lemmy would look much better without that garbage in the comments.
Subpar selection? I can count on the fingers of one hand the songs I have found on other sources but not Spotify.
I don’t even pay for Spotify, but I still use it to find new music because it’s hands down the best way to do so. I create a playlist of all the new songs I want and then purchase them all when Bandcamp Friday rolls around. I’m getting all the benefits of Spotify without paying them a cent (my ad blocker even works on it too), plus being as supportive as possible to the artists themselves.
What adblocker are you using? I got to the point where on FF with uBlock Origin Spotify just fails and mobile apps are 50/50 with NextDNS
uBlock Origin on Firefox has continued to work for me. It doesn’t skip the ad, but it does prevent any ad audio from playing so it’s just dead air til it’s done. It does have the occasional hiccup where it doesn’t resume the music after the ad is done, but it’s rare enough not to bother me.
I do also have a PiHole but I don’t think that’s contributing, as it behaves no different away from my home network.
I like Spotify. I don’t often want to listen to an album. I want to listen to a vibe. It’s good for that, and for introducing me to new bands and music.
But yeah, if you’re just using it to listen to one album at a time, and you know which album you want, then you’re using the wrong service.
90% of b2b software. They literally charge thousands of dollars while giving the worse piece of shit software you’ve ever used.
You pay for the support.
And the support sucks.
At least you can shift the blame.
Sometimes. Sometimes whatever executive demanded we use this doesn’t want to hear about it and will throw you under the bus because otherwise it would be their fault.
You wouldn’t need nearly as much support if they made a decent job in the first place.
You understand the model, good job!!!
Oof. Yes!
The proprietary cloud crap usually has worse or non-existent documentation, fewer features, and a terrible or non-existent API.
But it comes with a salesperson. So there’s that.
But people with cloud server orchestration skills are terrifyingly expensive right now, so self-hosting a better product can be a very hard sell.
Hmm really? Would proficiency with Terraform and knowledge of the services offered by at least one major cloud provider be considered “cloud server orchestration skills” or do you mean something more/different?
Yep! My best guess is that maybe 1 in 10 organizations currently has any in-house orchestration skills on staff at all.
(I’m just annecdotaly guessing based on my professional network, which is actually heavily biased towards organizations that have orchestration skills, but also based on job offers that my peers with orchestration skills are seeing.)
And the ones that have it get to charge a premium for shitty cloud services to the ones that do not.
That’s pretty crazy, good to know. We had a hard time hiring a “cloud engineer” last year ourselves, though for the client in question we were looking for deep Azure chops. I’ve been learning some Terraform for this reason so we can respond a bit better, sounds like I might be well served to focus on it. Feel like DM’ing with salaries / offers you’ve been hearing about, if you have?
The Salesperson is incredibly important. They take the person responsible for making the purchase decision out to lunch and for rounds of golf, after all!
Sometimes the value add is security, sometimes scaling or uptime. Enterprise considerations aren’t necessarily the same as for individual consumers.
Sometimes it’s just a dogshit product though, and the sales team pulled the wool over some execs eyes.
Sometimes the value add is security
Bahahahahahahahahhahahahahahah
In this case it’s not “security”, it’s offloading the responsibility of security to a 3rd party.
If the enterprise app leaks data, they’re the ones responsible. Not you, the IT guy who chose it
Enterprise software/services/consulting in a nutshell. It’s all just shifting responsibility.
Precisely
Oh fuck yeah! So much of my research into new tools is just checking to see if they have a demo, documentation, and price.
When I’m looking for a new tool, I don’t have the time to schedule a “quick” 20 minute call to do introductions and schedule a follow-up hour long meeting followed by a quote sent over in an email days later only to find out the price is so far outside the range there is no way it’s ever going to happen!
I’m not some useless middle manager looking for any excuse to look busy; I don’t have that kind of time to waste!
In a lot of cases, you only see the final price after signing up.
They always want to charge per user too instead of just charging a monthly fee. They’d rather have no money than not charge per user it’s actual crazy. Imagine any other industry turning away paying customers when it doesn’t cost them anything to have the customer. Software companies are insane. Can’t wait until their funding runs out.
Per user licensing is nothing compared to the ridiculousness of per cpu licensing.
Such shit really exists?
IBM’s IBMi products make you pay yearly to activate the cores.
Oracle has entered the chat
Enterprise Linux distros, enterprise (Oracle-owned) database management systems, etc.
Unfortunately, at work we use a bunch of Finite element modelling software and all of them have that type of licence.
What the actual fuck?
Per core licensing walks into the room.
I don’t miss doing Microsoft license audits.
It’s often per user, because the amount of support tickets usually scales with the amount of users.
All of the SaaS I looked at would not be a situation where the end employee would generate tickets. Only I as the owner would and even then the software is kind of set it and forget it for my use case which I made clear to the salesman. Many of them to their credit did kick it up the management chain to get a different quote. Only 1 company out of four or five went for it.
The problem I’ve run into is SaaS companies typically white collar companies who are used to paying per seat where employees generally make 6 figures, where as my blue collar company is full of dozens of part time employees where the per seat model breaks down.
Yah me too, for my small company per seat pricing is really painful. For some services we just have one account and share access; only one person logs in at a time and tells everyone else when they’re done.
it’s not an entire app but, discord profile decorations.
The fact it costs money isn’t surprising, but the amount of money charged is hilarious.
17$ for some graphics that some look like they took about 20 minutes to make. Just to make your profile look different than everyone elses. Then the “discount” given for having nitro for it is even more laughable.
Whats equally insane is that people fall for it. I know some people that have easily spent 60$ on profile decorations. Spending equal or greater than the cost of discord nitro is insane to me, even if the decoration doesn’t expire.
Also how discord dœs stickers . Like custom emojes , they’re tied to discord servers , unless you have nitro then you can use them everywhere . Such BS system , shoulda done them how LINE dœs them : you only need to buy the sticker pack once then you use them anywhere , no shitty subscription needed !
what bothers me even more than the price is that they all suck, and none of them fit my aesthetic. I could make my own decorations, and I’m offended that discord won’t let me.
Holy fuck, as if I needed more reasons to hate Discord… back when I thought it was just a new iteration of xFire I still hated it but could at least see a purpose for it, but it doesn’t even do all the shit xFire could
Xfire was the shit. I’d have paid a couple bucks a month for it, instead of it just dying. It was so crazy ahead of its time. Text chat, voice, game detection and tracking, clans, server browsing, broadcasting, pic and video hosting…
And the animations on them are so obnoxious I actively add custom CSS to remove them.
Vencord FTWThe thing that I find insane is having to pay for Nitro to have an animated .gif as your profile pic.
…The animation is played client-side, so literally costs Discord nothing to do this, and as a matter of fact it’s actually more effort for them to intentionally block animations from playing until you pony up than just letting the browser container the app runs in natively do its thing. Given that the Discord app itself is basically just a glorified webview container with some stuff bolted onto it.
I don’t want to sound like I’m on Discord’s side (I dislike nitro too), but that’s honestly just how a lot of paid add-on features on free apps work. They take away some functionality from the free one to incentivize people to pay.
On a similar note, skins and other cosmetics in video games that do nothing to help with camouflage—or worse—make you stand out more. Never understood why people waste money on that.
Difference is that that shit sometimes looks cool as hell and you see your skin constantly while playing(at least if you play in third person). You won’t stare at your profile picture for hours.
I can see that for a free game that you enjoy a lot, and want to reward with some money. You can make a donation, or get a silly skin for the same money (and have it visible that you donated some).
Early days of of micro-transactions did help you blend in more, but I noticed they started diverging away, leaving the more natural camos to be unlocked by gameplay, and the obnoxious/distracting ones as a premium.
Paid calculator apps.
Not only are many of them paid - but they are subscription as well. Imagine paying a monthly fee for your goddamn calculator.
In a sense this is great news. If you ever need to earn some money (somehow, anyhow) you now know that there are people out they who willingly pay a subscription for their calculator.
Calculator emulators are the way. Wabbit for ti-84 and similar, and hp prime (official) for a full CAS.
Pretty sure I paid for some Ti and HP calc emulators at some point. Only a couple bucks each, worth it at the time. Would not pay to subscribe though.
I paid for the pro version of HiPER calc, well worth it as I use it daily.
Soulver is the best calculator on my Mac and has been for more than a decade now.
After a long time of using CalcES on my android phone and cheating the ads away with PiHole, I finally spent the very little fee for the pro edition. The app is amazing and the creator absolutely deserves it.
Money laundering? Or just going kids download on devices with their parents data to go unnoticed for months at a time?
They 100% bank on people forgetting cancelling
Also, Apple gave iOS a default calculator just a few months ago. When I had an iPad I had to download dozens and dozens of calculators to find one that didnt have ads or subscriptions
Edit: I meant iPad. They sold iPads without the calculator from launch until Q4 2024
A few months ago, in 2007?
i think they meant ipadOS
Is it not the same OS? I had one iPhone and came back to Android.
apple brands them as totally seperate os’s but basically ipadOS is just ios with some extra features and different default apps.
One of those differences was the lack of a calculator on ios until recently.
What an interesting omission. Thanks for pointing that out!
I have mixed feelings here. I legitimately paid ($1, once, a decade ago) for a calculator app and feel it was a great value (I still prefer it to this day). But then again the free version was fine too and the one-time payment was essentially a donation to the developer for a great app that unlocked… Themes…
I like that model. You get to try the software for free and have a way to thank the developer and get something extra, rather than just a pure donation.
F-Droid has an Android port of the Unix maxima, which is a whole free and open-source computer algebra system, that handles all my heavier lifting. And I’m pretty sure that every phone that I’ve ever seen ships with at a software package that can act as a five-function calculator, if someone is just looking for something simple.
Both of those are very different use cases from what I have, though.
Yeah, I paid for PCalc because someone put in effort to make it, and it’s good. Don’t feel bad about that.
But I wouldn’t subscribe to one.
Yeah the subscription is mind boggling.
Boost / Sync for Lemmy
huh? i use boost (and used to use it for reddit before the whole API thing) and haven’t ever seen it ask for money or anything
Same, it shows ads, but they’re pretty easy to block. I paid for it just to help support the dev, he seems pretty cool.
Thanks 🫂🥲
If you’re really the dev, please add support for spoilers, it’s the only thing that makes me consider a different app. I’ve also been using Boost since Reddit, and I have a feeling spoiler tags worked there, but that was long ago and my memory is not that good.
Ready for the next version, thanks for your patience 🙏
Oh shit, what’s up? Great app, thanks for all you do!
wait- it has ads?? i had no idea xd
gotta love network ad blonking lmao
Can you teach me how to blonk ads?
omg I’m not good at spelling T-T
in my defense n kinda looks like a rotated c? kinda?
Don’t worry, I knew what you meant! You’re right though, n is just a rotated c 🤔
I read your comment, I thought a sec, and I just paid to remove the ads for boost.
Love boost.
What’s wrong with Sync, lol
Workout timer that wants a subscription
For me, any office apps. Never worked in an office, never wanted to. None of that stuff. Even if it’s free, if it gets installed with the distro, it’s the first thing that gets tossed.
