Avelon 1.0.7 out now - adds text selection, tweaks to the free tier, new pro features and lots of QOL improvements

Exactly. I’m sure this has taken a ton of time. Lots is offered for free. There are many alternatives if you want to go elsewhere.

Realistically, there aren’t a ton of people here using the app that would pay right now. Hence, the price is a little higher.

If someone wants to volunteer tons of hours to make an app for free that’s fine, but that’s their choice. Nothing wrong with asking for a bit of compensation for something that is not trivial to make at all.

Agreed.

Right, I don’t like all of these comments I’m seeing complaining about not being able to have something for free.

This is the sort of aggressive, sweary, condescending post that makes any discussion impossible.

I’d hope that Avelon fans could have a civilised talk about the way forward. But apparently not.

I posted a reply to your post about that, its a bug with an accessibility setting in iOS. Forgot to include the fix in 1.0.7, but you can resolve it for now by disabling "Button Shapes" in the iOS accessibility settings.

What mess?

They’re used by many more people. This app will be used by very little comparatively, hence the cost.

Yes it’s a lot for an app… but also it’s the cost of 2.5 meals at McDonalds so decide if that’s worth it to you?

Hmm, yeah would probably be useful to have it there too, but don't wanna remove the markdown highlighting either. I'll have to think about how it could be implemented in a nice way. You can always just swipe the reply sheet down and then select what you need since the draft will be saved meanwhile

Me also. The features rock but the little extras are good to have as well.

You're seeing the classic challenge of pricing, if you sell 10 copies at $30 would you sell 20 at $15 and make the same off it? You can't tell without lowering the price, and once you do that, going back up if it doesn't work will make people angry. Sales can help gauge this if you aren't feeling confident.

This is what I don’t see enough people discussing here. Many are saying they are interested in purchasing a lifetime “pay once” option, but not for $30 (I’m one of them). I would 100% buy the lifetime option for $15. How many others would? More than twice the amount willing to pay $30? I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case.

Have you checked out the "reduce white point" option in accessibility settings? Does that improve things or is there still too much contrast?

IMO the most important thing by far is making the core app experience as solid as possible. Things like post feeds, comment sections, posting, sharing, image viewers, inboxes, replying, editing, text selection, user profiles, swipe gestures, searching, font settings, sorting options, display options, hiding read posts and everything else you'd expect takes a lot of time to develop, maintain and polish. The vast majority of my development time is spent on improvements, bug fixes and new features for everyone, and I really do care a lot about creating a great experience that can help improving Lemmy overall. Offering some more niche nice-to-have features on top of that is a good way to support everything else.

I'm not going to add a higher tier - as I briefly mentioned in an earlier comment my goal is rather the opposite. If Lemmy keeps growing, Avelon Pro could at some point make sense as a $5-or-something one-time upgrade. Unfortunately that's just not the case right now.

That’s a lot of worries for not a lot of reason. Honestly, the dev needs to be supported and new features is a pretty industry standard method of generating an income. Aside from that, you’re literally seeing the dev move features out of the paywall, so it seems weird to be worried about some weird dystopian future in a thread about moving away from exactly that.

immensely disappointed in the fact you put everything (literally everything) behind A Paywall

Do you understand what literally means?

The free tier is just fine. You don’t have to pay for pro features if you don’t want to and it’s still streets ahead of other Lemmy apps.

What do you mean when you say that literally everything is behind a paywall? The core features are accessible for free.

I’ve moved to Avalon from Memmy, which itself is a great app and the one that spoke to me most when I made the mid year decision to largely cut my Reddit usage. It’s a great app particularly for free.

That said, we probably can’t talk about Memmy in this context without noting the almost two month absence of any updates for the app, which is only early in its life, due to the developers citing burnout. There’s certainly got to be some questions about sustainability for those guys when they have to also carry jobs etc and Memmy for all intents is a hobby for them.

Now maybe the apps in a place where you feel going a few months without updates doesn’t matter, that’s fine. At the same time it’s possible that a revenue stream of some sort would allow the devs to prioritise work on the app over other things. I don’t imagine Lemmy yet has the user base to sustain a developer full time on the single app alone, but having some income from the app may none the less assist greatly. People have even asked the Memmy team to consider adding paid tiers in recognition of some of the issues.

None of that is to say that I didn’t do a double take when I saw the price of Avalon, and did give it a second thought. It’s a decent price commitment, I agree. Apps that are paid for could also be abandoned too which is a risk. At the same time I have noticed a number of the Lemmy apps have had growing pains, burnout issues for devs etc, so while there are good free options out there in the longer term in many cases that may not be sustainable, and there is a place for paid apps particularly where that can contribute to the apps ongoing development.

TestFlight is for testing the app, not getting the paid features for free.