Which is one reason I’m happy to say that if you’re a Mac or iPhone user (or, ideally, both), you should absolutely go check out the newly updated Fantastical apps. There are a few new features and parity across platforms — I personally am excited for a calendar app that integrates with several to-do apps.

The thing about this update that may grab some attention is that it is moving to a subscription model. Historically, this kind of move has sparked consternation, but I’m not feeling any of that. It’s $4.99 a month or — in my preferred way to talk about subscription pricing — $40 per year (a $20 discount). That subscription gets you access to the iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch apps. Non-Apple users should look elsewhere.

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I think the subscription model is totally fair, especially given Flexibits’ history of updates and quality. That’s partially because, as I alluded to up top, there really aren’t better options for this category of apps given the rules laid down by Apple in the App Store.

If you’ve watched the App Store market dynamics over the past years, none of this will come as a surprise, but let’s recap:

    First, there was a rush to the bottom when it came to pricing. Many apps were priced at $0.99, which set a consumer expectation that iPhone apps are cheap.
    Driven by that dynamic and by ranked lists on the App Store, the app market moved to a sort of hit-based system, where games and free apps dominated downloads.
    (Many of those games switched over to very skeezy in-app purchase schemes once Apple later allowed microtransactions in free apps, but that’s a story for another time.)
    Over the years, Apple refused to offer more flexible pricing options to developers. There never has been (and may never be) such a thing as “upgrade pricing” in the App Store, unlike on more open platforms like the Mac. Developers either had to offer major new versions for free, charge current users the same amount as new users, or try to jerry-rig an in-app purchase system.
    (Apple also obstinately refused to let any app so much as gesture to the whisper of an idea that it might be possible to pay the developer in any way other than through Apple’s 30-percent-cut payment system, and is now facing anti-trust complaints on this point, but again, story for another time.)
    Perhaps realizing that the rules it had put in place for the App Store were skewing the market dynamics for apps, Apple switched over to a new system that encouraged subscriptions by reducing its cut after a year.

There are pros and cons to the subscription model for both developers and users and they’re all heavily context-dependent. So I’m not making a judgement on that one way or the other — only pointing out that the realm of possible business models has been heavily constrained by the App Store’s rules.

Those limitations have sometimes forced developers into weird decisions and I obviously wish Apple would open up to more pricing models. I especially wish it weren’t engaging in such blatant rent-seeking when it comes to taking a cut of in-app fees.

Anyway, the point is that if you see an app switch to a subscription model, it’s not necessarily doing so because it’s the trendy thing to do — instead, there may not be any other real choice.

One thing strikes me about Fantastical’s switch to a subscription model is how elegantly it was handled. I can’t imagine figuring out how to fork its versions to support this, but Flexibits is doing it:

    If you already own Fantastical 2, though, Flexibits has a pretty cool offer to help mitigate that feeling, in part. If there’s any feature in Fantastical 2 that is now a Fantastical Premium feature, you will still be able to use that feature in the updated app on the platform you own it on, even without a Premium subscription.

One quick note: A lot of my newsletters have had a little “?” in the subject line. It’s there not to evoke The Verge logo (though that’s a nice side effect), but instead to indicate that the newsletter includes a longer essay. I’ll aim to keep doing it, but you’ll notice this one doesn’t have one because it’s relatively short. I bring it all up as a reminder and also a heads-up that as tech news picks up over the next few weeks there may be a few more ?-less editions than usual.