Tap Forms 5 Question/disapointment

[eric]

Good morning, Brendan.

One of the reasons I chose to use your application—and support a small independent developer rather than a large tech company—was that, years ago, you mentioned that you were not a fan of subscription-based software. I appreciated that philosophy and it was one of the factors that led me to purchase Tap Forms.
So, to my disappointment, I now see that Tap Forms 5 appears to be reaching end-of-life and that the future direction is moving toward a subscription model. Needless to say, I am not particularly happy about this change.

What concerns me even more is that Tap Forms 5 currently relies on Rosetta. As Apple continues to phase out support for Rosetta, there will likely come a point where Tap Forms 5 will no longer run on future versions of macOS. This effectively leaves existing customers with little choice but to move to the new subscription-based version if they want to continue using the software.

Could you clarify the situation? Will Tap Forms 5 continue to be available and supported as a one-time purchase application, while the new version is offered separately as a subscription? Or is the subscription model intended to completely replace Tap Forms 5 once Rosetta is no longer available?

If the latter is the plan, then I will unfortunately need to start looking for alternative software. I understand that subscriptions provide ongoing revenue for development, but personally I am not willing to pay an annual subscription for a personal database application. At roughly $45–50 USD per year, the cost is difficult for me to justify, especially when I originally purchased the software with the expectation of a traditional one-time purchase model.

Thank you for any clarification you can provide.

[Brendan]

Hi Eric,

It takes a lot of time to keep Tap Forms up-to-date with all the changes that Apple makes to the operating systems year after year. Plus to fix bugs, add new features, and so on. To expect a one-time payment to get the benefits of all of that forever is no longer financially viable for me. Yes, there’s the upgrade model, but as you know, Apple doesn’t support that model in the App Store. I did that once before with Tap Forms 5 by releasing it as a new application with a migration function. Tap Forms Pro is the last time that I have to do that as now I’ll be able to release fixes, new features, and updates to account for OS changes as I go. I won’t have to hold back updates or new features for some big feature upgrade once a year or two. Everyone will now get them as I finish them. Plus I’ve been providing support to all my customers, no matter which version they bought for 18 years now. That also takes time away from development. I love providing help to all my customers. Everyone has always been super nice and I’ve been very grateful for that.

The Rosetta issue is unfortunate. I had fully expected Apple to just keep it there forever. I put a note in the App Store for Tap Forms 5 that it does require Rosetta. It will continue to function forever on Intel Macs of course and anyone who stays at macOS 27 on Apple Silicon Macs. I know that’s not feasible for everyone though. But it is what it is and the decision to remove Rosetta was out of my hands. Tap Forms 5 relies on a database engine that is no longer supported and was compiled for Intel on Mac. In Tap Forms Pro I yanked that out and replaced it with Apple’s CoreData engine and raw SQLite. So that will never be an issue again. Just doing that took me about a year of development.

So I’m very sorry that you’re disappointed in my decision to move to a subscription model, but without having done that, I saw the end of the road for Tap Forms. Revenues were declining year after year and now I’ve finally managed to turn that around. Now Tap Forms Pro has a very bright future ahead of it.

Tap Forms Pro has been out for just over a year now and I’m now starting to see a rise in my income from last year rather than just barely scraping by with a declining income year after year.

I hope you better understand my decision now.

Brendan

[Author]

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