Harbour/Store: support for paid applications

Something about tumbleweed ...

2017 here. I wonder if that guy still works at Jolla, at all... :(

One more reason for adding paid apps : provide a safe way to donate. In our (GiuliettaSW's) experience, we have noticed MANY people not donating due to security concerns. This is a big blocker IMO for fund raising.

Since when is Paypal unsecure?

There is a whole range of reasons why a bunch of people would not want to use paypal, even ignoring security issues.

It would be interesting to hear those reasons, at least for me.

@tortoisedoc: Something like this is unacceptable and it happens frequently: https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2013-09-05_PayPal_Freezes_Campaign_Funds.html

Agreed; in-app purchase system supported by Jolla would be perfect.

Maybe an interesting example is QuasarMx (www.meteorasoftworks.com): lite (free) version plus Pro (5 euro) version. The only one native paid app AFAIK.

A similar service operated by jolla and offered to developers would be perfect.

Very good point. Also, we can see top developers like coderus and nieldk struggling to keep up with development due to difficulties to find funding.

As soon as there will be paid app support there will be a dozen off apps finding their way to the ap store, quality apps. That is something that Sailfish and Jolla sure can use.

I agree with this statement. Jolla devs and the company is "loosing" money on not having native paid apps.

Very true. looks similar from my side. Jolla, you really need to allow additional QT modules as well as offering paid apps support!

Their only statement on the matter was a reply to a question on the development mailing list in April. They said it would be available H2 '14. That's clearly not going to happen. They haven't said anything about it before or since. Looks bad.

a donation system would be very nice instead purchasing apps

Would be nice for who? Surely not for the best developers out there whom we'd like to see developing for this platform. Tell makers of the world's most wanted applications to come to Sailfish OS and start developing for it in hope for a few donations. Then see them coming.... in your sweet dreams.

P.S. From my long experience, all those who always talk about donations are usually those who don't give them. They grab everything for free and expect others ("richer than them") to donate. That's why applications with tens of thousands of users usually get a few dozen donations.

Don't be a commie, let the market decide. Allow developers make paid apps, donation-based apps, free apps, cheap apps, expensive apps, whatever they want. And then let users vote with their wallets. This was meant to be a FREE (as in "freedom") platform, wasn't it.

A donation system would be nice IN ADDITION to a regular payment system, not instead of it. Why do some people want to have (and want others to have) less choice rather than more choice? If your concern is payment security and privacy then demand a secure payment system, and not no payment system at all. It's amazing how some people want this platform to be a GHETTO isolated from the world.

Blackberry 10 has been supporting paid apps since its launch - and that's why TENS OF THOUSANDS of native apps were made for it by now. Both free and paid. And I haven't heard of any security or privacy concerns or issues.

Lastly, I can't see how support for paid apps could force to buy any apps (or submit any private/sensitive data to the store) those who don't want to use it and do not want to buy any apps, and therefore affect their privacy in any way.

We should avoid getting dogmatic about this request. Jolla should not be a platform to impose your world view on others.

@ FJVA Are you talking to me?

There will always be both. But people need to be given the opportunity to make a living. I'd rather take paid apps than no apps. Software development is among the most expensive professions in the world. Good things coming with paid apps will outweigh the bad.

i totally agree your comment but i wish that we will not have an app store like iOS when jolla have a payment system for apps.

I disagree. The situation on the Nokia N9 was quite pleasant, IYAM. Lots of open source apps, either free or using the app store as an easy way to donate. And I have no problem paying for good apps, even if those are closed source. The "entry fee" for the N9 market was a one time fee of €1, with an absolutely free, cross platform SDK. On iOS, a $100/year subscription is required AFAIK, and development on anything but a Mac is constricted and/or will cost extra. So I'm not surprised the situation on iOS is crap, but that doesn't mean it has to be on Jolla.

So you are hoping to force people to make good apps for free? The current situation with the Jolla store is it is a year old everything is ether crap or non-existent. If you have deluded yourself into thinking the world can survive on open source alone then obliviously nothing nothing we will say will convince you other wise, but this is a prime example of that system not working. People need to have there skills valued. "every free app is totaly crap." that's Jollas problem right now. Also what you say about ios store is pretty rubbish since there are lot of apps that are free and do there basic function very well and look good that only ask for money for add-ons.

What an unbelievable RUBBISH you're saying, man. Did support for paid apps in the Ovi store for the Nokia N900 in any way affect open source development? No. An overwhelming majority of projects for the N900 were free and open source. Did support for paid apps on the Nokia N9 in any way restrict development of open source projects? No, there were hundreds of them. Does availability of an app store with paid apps on desktop Ubuntu in any way harm the development of open source projects for desktop Linux/Ubuntu? Obviously not. And so on.

iOS has absolutely nothing to do with it and it can't be used as a comparison. It is a closed platform where majority of people do not even know how to (and often can't unless they jailbreak) download and install stuff from outside of the official app store, hence almost no such projects, about which hardly any iOS user cares, anyway. They are simply a completely different kind of user than of the Jolla.

It is amusing to say that once support for paid apps will be enabled all open source developers will suddenly become greedy and hungry for money and will instantly drop all their free projects and start charging money for them. If their goal really was to earn money, they would be simply developing for a different platform, which has been supporting paid apps and allowing to make money on them for years, like e.g. BB10 (or soon Ubuntu, which many developers will eventually switch to if Jolla still doesn't give a flying ** about them).

Sailfish OS needs BOTH free and paid apps, for every user to freely choose. Just like ANY OTHER platform on this planet. Not just freeware, not just donationware, but ALL kinds of them like everywhere else. To have a choice is ALWAYS BETTER than not to have a choice. That you are alergic to paid apps does not mean that everyone else suffers from the same disease. I for one have absolutely no problem with paying for really good paid apps, whose quality is well worth their price, much more than in case of majority of those ever-beta free projects, permanently unfinished and not properly supported.

No one forces you to buy any apps if you don't want to. Keep being satisfied with those pitiful 200-300 native projects available for Sailfish OS after 14 months since its launch. This number will never substantially grow if there is no support for paid apps, as without it there's ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to attract new developers to this platform. They won't come just to make you happy, they need an incentive.

And even if support for paid apps would mostly attract commercial developers, it does not mean that only paid apps would be made by them. Many developers make both free and paid apps. But even if they were only making paid apps, I can't see how commercial developers could kill free/open source development. Would they use up all oxygen from the air and make open source developers suffocate? Come on, be serious.

An open source project of GOOD quality cannot be killed by a commercial app of NOT BETTER quality. No one will pay for a worse app instead of downloading a better one for free. So if there are open source projects of really decent quality, support for paid apps will have ABSOLUTELY NO IMPACT on them.

P.S. Look, this is the SEVENTEENTH most voted for topic (out of 9072) on this site. A topic created by Jolla themselves, 13 months ago. A topic which Jolla has NEVER responded to with a single word since they created it in December 2013.

Stunnning.

This site isn't really meant for developers, it's best to ask in the dev mailing lists if you want to know how far/close we are to getting support for paid applications: https://lists.sailfishos.org/pipermail/devel/

@ nthn Isn't this topic about support for paid apps? Wasn't it launched by Jolla themselves to get opinions about this very thing? That's exactly what I am discussing, and by posting this I am also trying to encourage everyone else to express their opinions to make Jolla see if people need support for paid apps, or else they may think that no one needs it. I guess it's high time to make this a publicly and widely discussed issue.

As for the dev mailing list, this question regularly appears there. Last time I've seen a response from Jolla was April 2014 when they said their goal was H2 2014. It was actually the only response from Jolla on this topic. Clearly, it's not something they consider crucial for the platform's future. So maybe if regular users start talking about it it'll finally make Jolla give any hints.

my hypothesis is that jolla simply doesn't have the manpower to handle everything needed for this young fledgling company at the same time. manning a crazy massive fundamentally critical effort like paid app ecosystem must be hard to hire for. i am also not aware of any solid data on how having a reasonably good android experience out of the box simply pushes native apps back as a priority, because the android experience put bluntly is good enough for the majority.

either way, i'm giving these guys a reasonably long amount of time to do whatever it takes to survive and carry on.

@ Ikraav This may indeed be the case. But maybe they simply aim too high, in terms of either being able to make something perfect or not at all. I mean, why not start with something really simple, and then gradually improve/enhance it. For me, it would be much better than not ever starting it at all. And if anyone (either a developer or a user) has any security/privacy concerns, no one can force him to sell or buy any applications in such a store until it grows up to meet his expectations, right?

The Ovi/Nokia Store never provided any content protection (the only protection was that files weren't directly downloadable but automatically installable, but an average kid knew how to intercept the .sis or .deb file and do with it whatever he wanted), it had dreadful customer and developer support, painfully long QA and many other drawbacks, but it was one of the biggest app stores out there and if you asked any Symbian/Harmattan user if he rather preferred not to have any app store than this dreadful Ovi store, everyone's answer would have been obvious. So, again, why not start with something as simple as the Ovi store was, and then just keep improving it, rather than postponing the launch until all developers leave and no one remains to launch the app store for.

Finally, please also note that an app store is an additional source of income. App store operators usually take 30% of each sale. Jolla is not a huge platform so it certainly wouldn't make them rich, but it would quite probably at least cover all the costs of running the app store (including the manpower needed for that). So as for now it is kind of a closed circle - they're not launching the store due to not having manpower (i.e. simply funds) to do it, while if they launched the app store it would at least bring funds to have the manpower to run it, and over time (due to the positive effects of having a growing number of apps and thanks to it a growing number of users attracted to the platform by availability of good native apps) it would eventually start bringing profits.

Also, I wouldn't call a basic support for paid apps a "fundamentally critical effort". Having maintained a huge Symbian site in the past, in 2001 I launched on it the first ever online store with paid Symbian (Nokia 9210 Communicator) apps and I ran it just by myself until mid 2003 when Handango offered me to operate a store for my site. It was as easy as signing an agreement with a company processing online credit card payments, and they even provided all the scripts needed to integrate their service with the store and an SSL certificate. It was in 2001, 14 years ago - if a 28 years old individual like me at that time could have done it, I'm sure Jolla can do it too, and due to how technology progressed since then certainly even easier and quicker. The payment processing company was taking 2%, not a huge part of those 30% that app store operators now take.

As for Android experience, I think your opinion is way too optimistic. Compared to BB10, Android compatibility and experience on the Jolla is (euphemistically speaking) very poor. Besides, if Sailfish OS turns out to be in a longer term a platform with just Android apps, believe me that once the current Jolla phone gets really old and existing users start thinking about an upgrade, a HUGE part of them will come to the obvious conclusion that to only run Android apps an actual Android phone will be a better choice as it will do it faster and will always be compatible with incomparably more apps. And this will be Jolla's end. It is an INSANE idea that any platform can survive based on JUST (inferior) compatibility with some other platform, without any ecosystem of its own.

@my-jolla Very true what u say, especially the point on the dangers of Jolla's and communies focus or efforts moving towards enhancing the droid-compatibility at the expense of letting the native #SailfishOS user and developer community to struggle to stay a live w/o proper app store features (paid apps, donate function, app store web-site, etc) and having too strict policies for Harbour QA in accepting native apps there. Unless the native app ecosystem grows, Jolla and SailfishOS us doomed to become just another fancy droid-launcher w/o hope of biz/user/dev/collaborator future prospects or continuity of any kind. All we can do is keep this topic (anong some related ones) open and actively voice up and keep on trying to get Jolla acknowledge and respond to this lack in native app provision, develooer support and store/harbour implementation. The fact that Google Play support can and has been hacked into Jolla must be one of the most harmfull feata for SailfisOS and Jolla community and company, cause any effort used to promote and enhance that tight Google integration in Jolla devices will eventually mean the end of SailfishOS as independent, open and unlike OS and community as we know it still today (just barely, however).

They said they hit some technicalities (whatever that means). And also something was mentioned about a developer program i think. Thats the latest i read on the topic.

I do agree with my-jolla's general thrust - the lack of response from Jolla is a bit bewildering. Even a 'we're working on it' or 'there's other things we need to do first' or anything would be helpful, rather than the silence. The lack of native apps is a bit of a problem, not a huge one because of Android cover, but still, I'd rather use a native app than an Android one, not least because I guess most people here bought a Jolla precisely because they didn't want to rely entirely on Android/IOS etc for their apps and whatnot.

I would be more than happy to see a Jolla store that is as my-jolla (I think it was him/her) has stated in the past - contains some paid-for apps that have passed a high QA standard, and genuinely enrich the Jolla experience. Either that, or have a prominent 'donate' button instead of a 'buy' button. Either way would see the number of native apps increase - and furthermore, the strict QA method could well mean that the Jolla store would see a rise in decent, well made apps and not +00,000's of poorly made, pointless apps that just provide app-store fodder.

Check the last sentences: https://together.jolla.com/question/77783/why-do-i-need-an-account-to-access-jolla-store/?answer=77860#post-id-77860

Well huzzah! That's answered then - I missed that post. Thanks for directing me.

@nthn While I am EXTREMELY grateful for the link you provided, my point still stands.

It is just a very basic side note in a response to a question about something different, merely a short mention, hard to find by all those interested specifically in it, and it does not say absolutely anything but what they said in April 2014, almost a quotation.

As I wrote, I think I am really not exaggerating that I expect (after so many months of patiently waiting) that this topic finally gets a SERIOUS treatment from Jolla. Not a one-line reply once a year deep inside some thread (about something completely different) on Jolla's mailinglist, not a side note in an answer to some other unrelated question on this site (while this very thread has been created by themselves specifically to cover this topic and for months it has been within top 20 most voted for topics, now 11th of all, really hard to miss), and merely just stating that "they're working on it and consider it a corner stone", which is what I've heard already a year ago. It takes a SERIOUS, informative, official statement, and an open discussion.

For big developer companies it is of absolutely no problem (and interest) whether Jolla will allow paid apps or not. They make big money elsewhere, and probably won't ever bother to do anything for this small platform. It is small developer companies and individual freelance developers who Jolla needs to take care of, as only them will want to support this tiny ecosystem and help it grow. And for them the time they spent on getting familiar with the platform, waiting months (or years) to finally be able to release their apps, and so on, directly translates to lost other opportunities and lost income that they would have made if they spent that time elsewhere. Jolla really needs to quickly comprehend it or they'll lose such people, for who revenue from app sales is often their main source of income, so whether to keep waiting or stop wasting time becomes an urgent decision to make.

Jolla proved many times that they know well how to properly communicate when it comes to topics which THEY consider important. Some things they say literally ad nauseam - on twitter, facebook, their website, wherever possible. See how they didn't have absolutely any problems with communicating to tens of thousands of people that they're launching a tablet, or many other things like that. Only this topic has since ever been treated so poorly that such a one sentence long mention deep inside some other thread makes us almost climaxing that they said ANYTHING about it after 10 months of silence.

But OK, I'm giving them one more credit of hope and I'll wait another month or two. Then, if nothing changes, I'll just go with no further complaints.

On a different note, as for "The lack of native apps is a bit of a problem, not a huge one because of Android cover, but still", well, on BlackBerry 10 people also were using Android apps until native apps started coming in decent amounts. But now that tens of thousands of native apps are available for BB10, everyone very clearly prefers native ones, and Android apps are used only where a native one still isn't available yet. And that even though BB10's Android compatibility is FAR more superior than Jolla's. Even better, BlackBerry also has a "Built for BlackBerry" program which only accepts apps which pass additional rigourous tests, so that the BfB designation guarantees for an app's superior quality and usability. Once I got some of my apps BfB approved, their sales increased by an order of magnitude. This clearly shows how native apps are MUCH MORE WANTED than Android ones, if they only exist that is. Those who say that Android apps are all Sailfish OS needs just DELUDE themselves because for now they don't have much comparison with how native apps would look better, work faster, integrate with the OS deeper, etc.

Hi there, we are actively working on something but we don't have anything to announce at this point. I know this is not what you want to hear exactly, but that's the best "some words" I can offer right now...

@cybette Thanks! Even this is much better then nothing :) Great to hear the work is in progress :)

@cybette Thanks for being the first jolla official to write something in this post (the one with the 9th most votes of all) after 15 months (!). But: you can't be serious there is still no roadmap, nothing more tangible to say than "we are doing something but we can't tell you about it". This is the most vague comment possible... I really don't get it. Do you deliberately NOT want to earn money? EVERY other smartphone OS has had an appstore with support for paid apps at the time of the first product's launch (when first iPhone came out, it was not a smartphone). It's an essential part of the ecosystem and an easy way to earn some extra money...

Yes, even bad news is better than no news, especially on a case which had a schedule earlier. Thanks for sharing, however, I feel sorry for both the developers and the users wanting their top apps. Well, I just hope we'll hear more on this, from you or other sailors, soon. Anything the community can do to help on this @cybette ?

@cybette Your comment is funny but not an answer nor really a new information. Working on something ...?