Opinion: Putting Apps on Trial

Developers have always struggled with the question of how to market their products. Sure, you can simply advertise, but for something like a computer program, the user’s experience with the application is one of the biggest ways to decide whether or not to purchase something. With only advertising, this can never be a factor in the decision of the potential customer. And so, software makers thought up the idea of a free trial. But this idea, despite being almost as old as software itself (or at least paid software) is still working out some kinks. Now there are mainly two types of trials time-limited trials and feature-limited trials. Both seem to have their own advantages and disadvantages, and work better or worse for different kinds of software.

My personal favorite kind of trial is the latter one, the feature-limited demo, but only in specific situations. Since the applications I tend to test out are games and not utilities or other programs, feature-limited trials are much less frustrating. Too many times I have been playing a demo, and gotten to the point right before a final boss, or a final move of a section, and the window shuts with the message “Thanks for playing! Your 60 minutes are up!” I much prefer games that allow you to play the whole first level or section completely, but nothing else. This occasionally translates into a shorter gameplay experience, less than an hour, but it’s much more satisfying.

However, feature-limited trials too can be incredibly frustrating. For utilities, such as system cleaners, video players, and so on, if a trial is feature-limited, then you can’t really get a good sense of what the application is like. Even if you know, in theory, all the great things it will be able to do when you buy it, you still don’t really know if it’ll work as well as they say, or whether it’s something you’ll actually use. For apps like these, it’s much better to have a trial you can use for a week, or ten days, or even just a few hours.

Compromises have, of course, been reached. There are many programs which allow you to do a certain function a certain number of times, for example fixing metadata of iTunes music, or removing duplicate files. This is not feature-limited, but also not a strict time limit, so the frustration and stress is lessened considerably. These are perhaps the nicest trials.

There is another aspect to this debate that must be brought up. Perhaps the developers do not want a trial to be perfect. My game experience, for example. When I’m cut off in the middle of a level, I want to (and often do) go right out and buy the game so I can continue immediately. And, for time-limited utilities, if it’s something like cleaning your iTunes library, maybe you can do it all within the seven-day trial and so won’t actually need to buy the application. Software trials are supposed to help the product as well as the consumer, and if the consumer can be satisfied without paying money, then that does nothing for the product. So trials are not perfect. But I don’t think they’re meant to be. They keep us on the edge, and just hooked (or angry) enough to go out and buy the full application. The developer’s know exactly what we want, and, through trials, they show us that they have it.

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