Flexibits, the makers of Fantastical announced a new version and a subscription plan on January 29.

At the time of this change they had thousands of mostly 5-star reviews on the App store.

Two weeks later, they have over 2500 1-star reviews, many from existing paid customers who were forced into a slew of non-consensual changes. (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fantastical-calendar-tasks/id718043190#see-all/reviews)

Their new version changed a few things:

* it now required everyone to have a flexibits account just to make the app work, with no additional functionality apart from un-breaking the app.

* while it allowed some extra features for previous paid users of the app, it still littered the UI with affordances which only work in the $40-year subscription version

* the upgrade happened automatically for everyone who had their app store set to autoupdate

* in a later update, flexibits (I think) removed the flexibits account creation requirement.

* flexibits wrote a blog post about how they need to switch to subscription model because they need money. (https://flexibits.com/blog/)

In their app update notes flexibits insists that version 3 has all version 2 features unlocked for customers who paid for v.2.

But, 1. there's no feature list comparison anywhere, and 2., there's no way to remove the UI pollution caused by listing locked-out features of the subscription-only app even for paid users of v.2 who were forced in the upgrade. A nag-free interface is a feature of the paid app which has been taken away.

This is a textbook example of how not to handle such a transition. It is so sad to see an otherwise brilliant team exercising such a tone-deaf execution and alienating their existing customer base.

It is even sadder that they continue to pretend that this is OK in the face of frustrated reviews and twitter responses from existing, paying customers. (https://twitter.com/flexibits/status/1225134145178931200).

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