Open Radar

 
30-Sep-2009 01:23 PM Patrick Burleson:
There is no way for a developer to charge for a new version of an application on the iPhone App store without creating a whole new binary. This means those that have already purchased the app are not automatically notified of the update. Also, it means users need to pay the full price of the new version, not allowing the developer to provide a upgrade discount to those users. 

As it stands now, to maintain customers, a developer issues updates to their app and existing users get those updates for free. That means a developer can only get revenue from new users. Not a very sustainable model. 

I'd propose adding versioning to iTunes connect to allow for multiple major versions of app that a developer can update independently. For the sake of this example, let's call them, v 1.0 and v 2.0. Users of v 1.0 would continue to receive updates for the 1.0 series for free as well as a discounted update price to v 2.0.  The store would show the highest major version. This would allow the developer to issue quick patches for 1.0 in case something breaks (for instance a Twitter client updating for the ID value exceeding a long). 

New users would buy v 2.0 at the current price and never know about 1.0.