Congratulations, first -- that's a good thing to run out of!
But it's a bit infuriating that the problem seems to be completely fake; that is, of course Apple has no limitations to how many review copies and/or tokens they can generate; they could trivially give you a button to request more.
In cases like yours, that would have been the more profitable choice for them... but they're operating at immense scale, which generally means removing choice as much as possible -- and there must be some loophole they're closing (though I admit I don't see it yet). They can't pay someone to check every possibly dodgy request for more copies/tokens, and so they can't check any.
/rant -- this is certainly a tangent to the article! I just found it startling. I've sold my own software and online subscriptions for more than a decade (though nothing ever likely to become big) and naturally if I feel like giving away copies, they're mine to give.
Hah. During the moment, when I realized the massive influx and that I was "out" of tokens, it was incredibly disheartening... one of those moments where the floor seems to disappear type of things.
it's just the "price" one pays for being part of this ecosystem i suppose. very thankful for it in general, but, there is always room for improvement.
Well, it is a fake problem. There's nothing preventing a developer from hosting a binary on a server and sending the download link to a potential reviewer or user, other than the simple matter of implementing license checks and demo timeouts. It's the same now as it was 20 years ago.
It's telling that many App Store developers, even very successful ones, no longer bother with that crap. It's just so much easier for both the developer and user to send out a promo code in an email.
well, what might be considered "simple" is not entirely simple. sure, i could send out the packages to anyone, provisioned locally. sure.
but... doing a demo with license checks really, really, really well...? that takes time, care, and impact user-experience.
i decided that i didn't have time (yet) to implement a really kick-ass demo / trial version... but in the future i'd like to take a serious look at it.
context is important: as an indie developer i only have so much (so little) time to invest... i have to really carefully choose my battles of where i spend that time... and that's really the hardest part of it all.
But it's a bit infuriating that the problem seems to be completely fake; that is, of course Apple has no limitations to how many review copies and/or tokens they can generate; they could trivially give you a button to request more.
In cases like yours, that would have been the more profitable choice for them... but they're operating at immense scale, which generally means removing choice as much as possible -- and there must be some loophole they're closing (though I admit I don't see it yet). They can't pay someone to check every possibly dodgy request for more copies/tokens, and so they can't check any.
/rant -- this is certainly a tangent to the article! I just found it startling. I've sold my own software and online subscriptions for more than a decade (though nothing ever likely to become big) and naturally if I feel like giving away copies, they're mine to give.