I really hate these dark patterns but it seems par for the course for this industry. At what point do people realize good relationships with long term customers matters more than the incremental dollar?
I don't think it's a zero sum game. Just from the top of my mind, how about
- offer bug updates for v.2 existing customers with no additional feature development
- offer a paid upgrade with lower subscription for existing customers
- offer more affordable iphone-only or ipad-only subscriptions (currently it's $40/year for a suite of iphone, desktop, ipad apps)
- offer an ad-free v.3 upgrade locked to v.2 features to existing customers
- offer a v.3 upgrade requiring existing customer to make an informed choice vs. forcing it as an upgrade replacing their their current, paid for app with another one nagging them for subscription.
I spent 1 minute on these options, as an amateur in the field, and they all sound like viable possibilities for increasing revenue while retaining respectful trusting relationship with existing paying customers.
"The network needs machines that store both application data and user data, and rewards machines that perform this storage with cryptocurrency tokens."
- Isn't it likely a bunch of people will just host on AWS/Google Cloud?
Being decentralized means that the same backend logic can run on any cloud provider, or on a simple server connecting to the internet. But it's okay if in practice many of the hosting providers are running on top of cloud providers.
