Hey everyone! For more than a month now I’ve been working hard on the biggest update to Avelon so far. Today I’m really excited to announce that it’s finally out on the App Store! The update includes a whole bunch of cool new features for people who want that little extra and QOL improvements all-around.
Some of the highlights of this update include:
- Community groups
- App themes
- Right-edge swipe-to-go-forward gesture
- Custom app icons
- GIF/video scrubbing
- Advanced filtering tools, including keywords & instances
- Fixes to a bunch of iOS 17 related issues
- New markdown editor tools
- Smart comment jump button
- Ability to manage and clear app cache
- Support for Lemmy 0.19RC
- Lots of bug fixes & improvements all around
I really appreciate everyone who has helped with beta testing during the 1.0.6 cycle, you guys are honestly great!! It’s super motivating to hear so many people enjoying the app, and as always I’m open to suggestions and feedback. I hope you find the Pro-model I’ve landed on a fair/decent way to run the app. I’ve tried my best to consider all factors like affordability, development, as well as the quality & quantity of what Pro offers - and I hope I’ve found a good middle ground.
As for the future: for 1.0.7 I’m thinking I’m gonna focus primarily on performance, stability & bug fixes, but I’ll probably throw in some more QOL features as well. Just let me know if you’re missing anything or if you find any pesky bugs or nuisances. Hope you enjoy the update!
Edit: Seems to be a slight issue with upgrading to pro, working on it 😅
Edit: Fixed!
Yeah, the size of the user base is basically the #1 reason. I was surprised too when I saw the pricing for other apps, but I’ve realised they were more reasonable than I expected. Unfortunately there’s just not nearly the same number of people using an app like Avelon compared to just about any reddit app.
As much as people might dislike subscriptions they are a very good way to mitigate the risk for devs. I really wanted to provide a one-time purchase too though, and I landed on what I feel is pretty fair if you compare it to other players (Sync is 99$ I believe, Bean is 50$, Avelon 30$). And of course the free version remains just like before - pretty solid imo with more features out of the box than most other iOS apps.
I respectfully disagree, the key point is whether the user thinks the price is fair value. When you put basic safety features like content filtering behind such a big paywall I think this fails the fair value test.
My other point is that just because other apps have set high price points doesn’t mean that many (or enough) people have paid those prices.
Edit: I’ve noticed that other safety features like indicating bot accounts are behind the paywall. But traditional Pro features, like extra app icons or themes, are in basic. Please could you consider a rethink. We all want Avelon to succeed but this seems a mid-step.
Sure thing in the end it’s your app. I don’t know where these prices a coming from, but I sure won’t pay anything in that range for any app.
Neither will I.