Aqua mail going to subscription

[arf8]

Agree, I personally have no problem if they snap the line now and diverge with new features for premium.

There is a business cost and I rather they develop and fix based on your license type. Rarely will open source remain until someone buys them and makes it worse.

[chris122380]

Dear Aqua Mail users,

We have heard your feedback!

Refer to this post, please.

https://www.aqua-mail.com/forum/index.php?topic=8803.0

This really doesn't change the features will get though. We basically paid for a service to go stale.

We paid for what we got, and as long as it is maintained, bugs fixed, etc. It's a good product. But the field is changing, new things get created. And the next level of  tech may cost more.

Do you think FairEmail will stay the same, or not someday go the way of AquaMail? I've tried it and it has many impressive features, but frankly I find it clunky and awkward to use, and of all the many email apps I have it is the absolute slowest at loading message content when I open an email. So it needs work and maybe a design refresh and that will cost money. Maybe that's why it hasn't been done.
  Further, if FairEmail is so good, someday some big company is going to buy it, just like Mozilla bought K-9, and things will change. Over the years the developer of FairEmail has quit or threatened to quit supporting the app several times. Who's to say one day he won't just throw in the towel?

So, will AM become "stale" for Pro users one day if they can't get access to new bells and whistles? Possibly. I have several old "legacy" apps that haven't been supported or updated for years, but what they do they still do well. They're "keepers". AquaMail (Pro) even without any new features, AI, etc could well become one of those for me. Not stale bread, but  a fine old wine!

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Businesses have to realize that not everyone can afford to continue paying subscription services. They keep trying to turn everything into a subscription service and we don't make enough to be able to do that long term. Subscription music, movies (it's bad enough you have to pay a subscription service for almost every major film studio), etc and you even have car companies trying to charge you a subscription on top of your basic car It is outrageous.

[arf8]

Get used to it, that is where the industry is going to monetize. Blame Capitalism and greed in some cases

[eheartshine]

I've personally downgraded to 1.44.2 and I'm staying there forever now, I guess. I tried Fairemail but unfortunately EWS requires closed-source components (that AM uses) to work properly. (Many licensees keep IMAP disabled, and Fairemail and all other open-source email apps need it even if you authenticate with OAUTH.) I've migrated all of my non-O365 accounts over to K9, though I might give Fairemail a second look this weekend.

[arf8]

what version you have does not matter, you can upgrade to the latest and still enjoy everything for now. Read the prior posts. If you enjoy AM and want the newest features you will have to pay. I'm more concerned with making sure we get all the premium features right now as of today in our Pro license and not lose current features we enjoy.

[mkgtu]

I took think it's only right that we (Pro) keep what "premium" features we have.

A little history. It's possibly a little disingenuous for AM to have pointed to the "pro" features (very few!) that were described in the Google Play app description for the "Pro Unlocker" we all purchased. That was October 2019 and the Pro Unlocker app, along with its description, hasn't been updated in almost FOUR YEARS. There were a fair number of features added to the main AquaMail app since then and all Pro users had access to them as they came along even though the Unlocker description had not been updated to account for the new features.

   Furthermore, it isn't really clear whether all of those new features were Pro-only or were just additions to the basic version of the app. And some of them are not earthshakingly "premium" in nature and most are part of a lot of other apps basic/free packages.

   Then somewhere along the way someone decided to switch from the one-time purchase Pro model to a subscription model and, for whatever reason, decided to call it "premium" instead of "pro". Perhaps that was to avoid confusion, but the result, as we can see here, is quite the opposite: chaos and muddy water!

   The choice to create a "premium" model instead of just keeping the "pro" designation and grandfathering in the old members probably made it necessary to now enumerate what was included in the "premium" vs the "basic/free" plan, with the old "Pro" version left in no-man's-land.  I think for any app the decision about which features are free and which need to be paid for is pretty arbitrary. Some of AM's now-premium features could just as easily be free ones, there's nothing intrinsically "premium-ish" about any them, and at the time they were added it wasn't clear, if you were a Pro user what they were, free or Pro. They were just new and you could access them.

   If there were to be changes to what Pro users could or could not access when the new "premium" plan was invented, then that should have been clarified at the time of Premium's birth.

As it stands now I'm happy to just keep what I've got and will wait to see what "new" things will be added later before I decide whether to subcribe. But I will say this: new features that will be Premium-only had better have that WOW factor. Simple new additions or improvements should just be part of the basic app.

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[eheartshine]

what version you have does not matter, you can upgrade to the latest and still enjoy everything for now. Read the prior posts. If you enjoy AM and want the newest features you will have to pay. I'm more concerned with making sure we get all the premium features right now as of today in our Pro license and not lose current features we enjoy.

The features table available in this post states otherwise. Martin has not clarified what will be happening to the bottom features that are unchecked. If they're not removing anything, then why bother unchecking anything at all?

[Anupe]

Outlook stopped for me after I updated the app to the latest version.

Any alternative email apps I could look at?

I am a Pro user and I do not want to consider a yearly subscription.

[arf8]

what version you have does not matter, you can upgrade to the latest and still enjoy everything for now. Read the prior posts. If you enjoy AM and want the newest features you will have to pay. I'm more concerned with making sure we get all the premium features right now as of today in our Pro license and not lose current features we enjoy.

The features table available in this post states otherwise. Martin has not clarified what will be happening to the bottom features that are unchecked. If they're not removing anything, then why bother unchecking anything at all?

Like I said it doesn't matter what version you use. In the future any feature could be disabled via license check. The newest version has the same features as the last version.

[arf8]

Latest version for now

[chris122380]

Latest version for now

It has changed about 3 times in the last few days. Makes me wonder if the unsubscribe feature might be part of something they have to subscribe to (or a AM server side implementation). I never use the unsubscribe features as I'd rather click unsubscribe over an automated system I can't tell or know exactly what it's doing. Plus many of those services make me wonder if they're spying on our inbox and making more money by selling our metadata. This is one reason why I am highly suspicious of email subscription services. Paying for a product who is already collecting and selling your data to make even more money off of ya (not to say that my email provider isn't already doing it).

[arf8]

The unsubscribe option was something they added recently which now they want to lump into their premium license which is fine by me, like you I will not be using it.

It was a long discussion about the firebase analytics and some of the other trackers AM uses there are ways to turn that off as well outside of the app

[JerryF]

I was flabbergasted when I saw this notification in AM.

Who would pay for a subscription-based android app?  The new(ish) owners of AM have joined the bandwagon of large companies with software.  It's a shame.

As a user who tries out a free app and ends up using it, I purchase the paid (Pro) version which I did with AM.  If an app doesn't have paid version, I make a one-time donation to the maker.  Now it's like extortion to to get me to move to the "premium" version.  Not cool.

[Boothy]

Having used AM Pro for years, I'd be sorry to leave it if we're to lose the features we already paid to keep. I also agree that any current Pro users should be transferred directly to Premium without the need to be regular subscribers. Save that for new users.

I downloaded FaireMail this afternoon and spent time setting it up to look pretty much how I've had AM looking & responding. My finger is currently on hold over the "pay" button ... but it's definitely ready to go ahead and click if we're to be pushed to it.

[JerryF]

Thank you Martin.