I’ve noticed this before, but it’s come up again today as a result of an earlier post HERE talking about a one-day free offer on the SimplyTweet app. At the time I was drafting my post, the app was definitely showing as free in the US store on my Mac, and I assumed the offer was for today, December 7th.
SimplyTweet is a very good and feature-rich Twitter app for the iPhone, so we wanted to share the news with readers. Now it appears though that the offer expired very shortly after my post appeared. I’ve sent a Twitter message to the developer asking whether perhaps there was an error on the timing – but have not had a reply yet.
What this highlights is a simple problem with the nature of this offer – all offers of this type (i.e. apps gone free or discounted for a fixed period of time) should clearly state what the date or date range is for the offer. I should be able to take a quick look and see that this offer is for December 7th, and as long as it is still 12/7 in the store I use, the offer should be valid. I don’t know if this another issue where the devs don’t get enough communication from Apple to know when their offer text will go up, or what the problem is – but it’s stupid to allow any One Day Deal sort of offers to show up in the store without a date clearly stated on them.
Am I missing something on this?
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Missed something? No, you've nailed it.
Thanks – really seems a very obvious thing to me.
Totally agree on this point – it's happened to me a few times as well. What would work even better, is if Apple allowed devs to post some kind of countdown clock, so you knew exactly how long you had until the price changed back.
Countdown clock would be nice, but I'd honestly be happy with just a clear date or date range.
Wow…I am glad I read your post nice and early…and then went to my AppStore right away and grabbed this for free.
I saw this last night listed as free but when I tried to download it I got an error saying it was being updated. When I checked later it was back at normal price. I checked again this morning (I check AppMiner during my morning coffee) and saw it as free again and was able to download it this time. So I was able to get it for free this morning but not sure when it went back to normal.
La dee da.
Still no call.
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