For the application market, Marco’s experiment makes four critical points:
1 / A free/light version (hopefully) leading to revenue from a full-featured app no longer appears to be the all-around best promotional scheme.
2 / The free/light version works fine for games: I download the free (or near-free) version, I get hooked and I pay to increase my level of play, get more potent weaponry, etc.
3 / But on many content or services-related applications, people want to taste (and to test) the real thing. This is where the free/light option shows its limitations: it degrades the product’s image and frustrates users because most of the really attractive features are disabled.
In a market with a hyperactive swarm of competitors, the potential customer will therefore be inclined to ditch the crippled app and look elsewhere for more features. Users’ curiosity is vastly underestimated. So is their propensity to become quickly (and sometimes unfairly) frustrated. But they have the money…4 / User reviews play a significant role in an application’s fate. Providing for free a half-baked app is likely to trigger reviews based on… half of its features. Better give it a chance to be assessed on a fully-functional basis.
As the mobile applications ecosystem gains in sophistication, there is no shortage of ways to develop better promotion systems.
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