Today Apple added a new section dedicated to promoting free applications on the App Store. One of the subsections of this new feature is “Try Before You Buy.” This section features many of the popular “free” or “lite” editions of apps, but the section title is what makes this all interesting.
Apple willfully ignored 25+ years of commercial software distribution trial-and-error market experimentation and education.
Try Before You Buy won a long time ago, but for some inexplicable reason Apple seems to want to drag us back to the days of Egghead Software outlets.
Try Before You Buy is good for customers, and it’s good for developers. My best guess is that Apple somehow thinks it’s not good for Apple, and that was reason enough to disallow it.