If you did not hear this news, it is important that you do. There is a hugely popular mobile app, called CamScanner. It turns your phone camera into a xerox machine. You just put those two pages on the table, snap twice and you get a PDF file, with image cleaned up to black and white, straightened by paper edges. And it is free. Well, an antivirus manufacturer research lab just found it contains a virus. It was secretly installing some apps that did some unsavory things. What’s more this malware inside the CamScanner was not of CamScanner own making. It was part of an ads network component, that CamScanner used, in order to show ads in their app. CamScanner was just a mule, carrying this secret load when they were monetizing their free app through ads.
Free cheese, they say, is only in a mousetrap.
Things went well for CamScanner. The product was good. I was using it myself for years on all my mobile devices. Their image processing chops are solid. The app is easy to use. Being free and good what is the wonder it was so widely used and very popular. But what happens when you need to start making money? It may come as a surprise to some people, but developing apps cost money. Even more, its never over. You’re never really “done” developing software. The concept doesn’t exist. Every year, there’s a new version of the Android, or iOS Operating System. Each time the OS changes, apps must change as well and adjust. Modern mobile devices go out every year – apps must add support for them all the time so that when users upgrade to a new phone, the app will run smoothly on it. Software changes tremendously fast these days, and just keeping the existing service working is costly. Therefore, it is a challenge for an app to just maintain it all and keep everything working.
So what does one do? One can charge money, of course. But many people are already got used to getting it for free. Many people will not use an app if it is not free. We know from our own painful experience very will. If you’ll read the 1-star reviews for OrganizEat, you’ll find that the most common complaint that people have is that the app is not free.😃
So, as an app developer, you are at a juncture where you have to earn money to keep the app running. What do you do? Do you charge for it, risking losing the free users you have? This is a difficult choice. Apparently, CamScanner guys decided they would keep the app free, and show ads. And it turns out now that this decision turned their fabulous product into a malware mule.
Why you may ask, am I writing about it. For two reasons. One is to warn you to remove CamScanner if you have it on your Android device. But two is to explain why OrganizEat you use and trust will not be like CamScanner. It will neither be as popular, but most importantly: it will it be carrying malware. OrganizEat made a different decision. A difficult one. We charged for the app a modest sum from the get-go.
Like any app, even if we do not add new features (which we constantly do!), OrganizEat needs maintenance. Every new generation of phones changes things. Many things. So just to keep the app working on a new phone you have to pay. Then there are features to add. Over the years iOS got many. Our Android app, released a year ago still is in the process of gradually closing the gap. To synchronize and backup your recipes, there is cloud storage. Computers sitting in well air-conditioned huge buildings owned and operated by providers like Google or Amazon or Microsoft. We rent some, and it costs us. For this ongoing costs, it was unavoidable that we transitioned to subscription.
We are thrifty. We keep overhead low. We do it all to be able to charge reasonable sun for the app we make. But we don’t insert any third-party ads into OrganizEat – and we are proud of it. So this is the bottom line. If we have your trust it is by design. We chose to let you support our efforts directly. To invest in the future of the app you love. To ensure we are not facing a choice between bad alternatives CamScanner makers did.
~by Rachel
