“I’m not paying $4.99 for a whozamuzzle app! That’s ridiculous. Ooh, here’s a free one! Oh look if I pay $1.99 a month for premium I get all these cool extra features! Whoa there’s a deal where if I pay $14.99 I get a lifetime subscription? Sold!”

Yes, an up front one time license fee would be better for users in most cases, but that doesn’t compete well with “free” with an asterisk.

If I know an app well by reputation already, perhaps I've already used their service as a website and I simply want to go deeper, then I have zero qualms about paying "up-front" in the app store for a license fee. I've done this a few times for apps that are $10-$15. No problem there. Especially when that fee is perpetual and not a subscription. One of the first Android apps I purchased in 2015 is still listed on the app store, and still "owned" by me from that original payment!

Now unfortunately there are many categories of apps that I don't know by reputation, and I can't really try before I purchase them. So for any app that I want to test out, have on a free trial, an "up-front license fee" doesn't really work for that, does it? Especially if it's priced as a perpetual license and not subscription - a cheap subscription I could cancel after the first month. So this is where "free with in-app purchase" comes in.

There are many apps which are like this which have at least two app listings. One is the "Premium app" with up-front pricing and another listing is the "Free trial" app with the in-app purchase for the Premium upgrade.

This gets troublesome when I'm using multiple devices, and multiple accounts, and uninstall/reinstalling to try and troubleshoot things. Because eventually me or the system becomes a little confused about what I've paid for, and I'm unsure whether I will get the paid features by installing the free app, or if I need to pay again. Perhaps this is an oft-beloved trap by app vendors, because I can imagine that many, many customers simply pay over and over to install the Premium app, when they could've installed the free one and it would've activated as Premium when it vetted their account purchases.

For one app there was the main app listed in the Play Store, and when I wished to buy into it, the developer provided an "<app> Supporter" auxiliary app which was not the app, but served to unlock those paid features within the main app. And thereafter, it was unclear which app I'd need to download, but it seemed that I only needed to install the Supporter app once in order to activate everything.

So yes, confusing, but perhaps a necessary evil, when it is not easy to trial apps without purchase. I think that any app providing free/freemium/premium tiers of purchase is sometimes forced into these bifurcations because of how app stores work. The customer just needs to be savvy enough to follow along.