Fantastical 4 and Windows Version
We’ve spent the last 4 years making Fantastical better than ever across Apple devices, and with version 4.0 we decided to go even bigger by finally bringing the world’s best calendar app to a Windows PC near you.
For the Mac and iOS versions, it adds a Control Center widget and support for Miro conference calls, but otherwise the release notes show bug fixes. The price has increased from $40/year to $57/year. They are still honoring old, non-subscription purchases with the old feature set.
The short version is all of the core sync and business logic is shared with Mac (we reuse our Objective-C) and we leverage AppSDK + WinUI for the UI. Currently we don’t make use of Swift on Windows and don’t have plans at the moment to.
So far Fantastical for Windows is resource-hungry and unstable, despite its feature completeness. First time I tried to edit an event, it hung. Not sure if this resource usage is typical (memory usage is still climbing, up to about 1.2 GB now) but it’s more than I afford on my work machine, and way more than on the Mac; will try again in a bit I think!
They’re not using Electron, and it doesn’t seem like there would inherently be a lot of extra overhead from using Objective-C, so hopefully they can get the resource usage down.
Previously:
Update (2024-11-02): The subscription price was actually increased in 2023 and is unchanged since then.
Update (2024-11-04): John Gruber:
I’m trying to think of a similar app — a serious Mac-assed Mac app that eventually was ported to Windows — and I’m coming up empty. It just doesn’t happen. I might go all the way back to Apple bringing iTunes to Windows.
[…]
[The] reaction to Fantastical seems overwhelmingly positive from the PC media[…]
@daringfireball Another example might be iA Writer for Windows and Android. It started as an iPad app before coming to Mac.
scrivener.
It’s a short list.
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FIFTY SEVEN MFING DOLLARS A YEAR FOR A CALENDAR
And, just like they were over four years ago when v3 came out, they're obscuring (on desktop website) and flat-out hiding (on iOS website) the total cost of the subscription. The only place it actually shows the full cost up front in a non-obscured (and non-hidden!) way is if you subscribe in-app.
Desktop Web: https://share.icloud.com/photos/009D17bzae5QXmUsZtdbJ112A
iOS Web: https://share.icloud.com/photos/08bJnCS0DcKAYKaEZTKS5Bf9A
iOS in-app: https://share.icloud.com/photos/04dTvR6EM2KbG4u2_uSKdxnGw
And I will reiterate the other thing I said in 2020: given the gap between v3 and v4, at $40 a year, they charged just shy of $200 for v3. Granted the time between v2 and v3 was shorter, but even if we use that shorter time+price increase and extrapolate to v5, it'll be a bit under $285. For a calendar.
None of this is how good businesses behave. None of this is how a company that makes an app that is routinely praised as one of the best on Mac behaves. This is insane.
Agreed. Flexibits are a prime example of one of the worst subscription offenders. I love the Fantastical app, but I don't like how they lock some basic features behind a paywall without any choice. For example, give us different tiers of "unlocks". I only want about 20% of the features that they hide behind the subscription. I'm not paying $5/month for things I won't use, but I would pay $1/month to get a few extra features beyond what the free version offers.
I'm so sick of this subscription creep. I subscribed to Carrot Weather years ago for I think $4/year which was reasonable. Now they don't even offer that tier, but so far they allow existing users to keep it as long as they don't cancel. If you want to subscribe to Carrot today it'll cost you $15/year!!! It includes extra features above the tier that I started with, but they're features that I don't need.
Other apps like Parcels package tracking used to be $3/year when I subscribed in 2020, now it's $5/year with ZERO new features. And this app is about 100x less complex than a weather or calendar app.
Flexibits did not tell Mac users they were funding a Windows port. Now Mac users pay even more, due to higher Windows support costs.
To be fair to Carrot, a) they have *a lot* of subscribers on legacy plans where they may be losing money, because b) every time they have to query a weather service, it costs them money. I believe $15 (or even $25) is a fair yearly price for a fantastically (ahem) made weather app because they actually do incur ongoing expenses just by a user opening the app. Flexibits don't, as far as I know. And of course, that said, $15 or even $25 is far less than Flexibits is asking.
I get the "paying for features you don't want" thing but that is a thing even with standalone, perpetual licensing, so I'm less upset about that.
If subscriptions don’t work for you, there are plenty of other options out there. Developers are people too, with expenses, families, and yes, a desire to enjoy life just like everyone else.
In the early days of the App Store, new users were constantly buying apps, which helped cover the cost for everyone. But now that the market has changed, developers need to adapt, and subscription models are often the best way for them to keep improving their products.
Think of it like this: most of us are paid regularly, essentially a “subscription” income. So if that works for you, maybe it’s worth considering why a subscription works for indie developers too.
Objective-C cross platform so they're using GNUStep on Windows I presume? I think DJPro does this as well. Objective-C for the Win --pun intended.
Would be great if they did a blog post on this; I've been thinking about using ObjC in Windows apps for a minute but I've been pretty busy lately.
If someone makes a cross platform IDE for ObjC I think we can just kill Swift from the outside.
I'm also pretty sour on software subscriptions and try to avoid them when I can. I think my main issue is the part where the software will stop working at some point, and that could be because the company goes out of business or cancels the software rather than me no longer paying for it. I also don't like the idea that I have to keep paying for something that has no further cost to the seller, for the same reason I don't want to keep paying for a piece of art or an appliance.
That said, if the software includes a service with an ongoing cost, such as serving live data like a weather app, I'm more inclined to feel like I'm getting what I'm paying for. Paying for support is totally fair too.
I also am fine with paying for updates. In that case, it's a new piece of software that has new features or fixes, and is usually required as the relentless march of new operating systems and devices continues.
So on that note, is there any compelling reason why software developers have abandoned the model of selling the software once, and then selling updates? What was wrong with that? Especially on Apple platforms, you're pretty much guaranteed to get additional sales when the new release of macOS or iOS inevitably breaks everything and requires a full update to the app.
@Michael
> They’re not using Electron
> we leverage AppSDK + WinUI for the UI
There is more than one way to skin a cat. Modern Microsoft UI frameworks are truly terrible; a far cry from MFC, WinForms and even WPF to some extent, all designed by a better class of engineering, for a class of hardware that required rigorous optimizations, rather than just spewing code as quickly as possible for half-assed implementations.
A lot like Apple’s Swift and SwiftUI stories compared to the elegance of AppKit and ObjC, albeit that was never really performant in the way MFC was in late 90s and early 2000s.
> If someone makes a cross platform IDE for ObjC I think we can just kill Swift from the outside.
You can just use VS Code or even Visual Studio.
The Objective-C toolchain for Windows that Flexibits and Algoriddim use is open source here and also available for Android as well:
https://github.com/gnustep/tools-windows-msvc
https://github.com/gnustep/tools-android
BusyCal is $50 USD on macOS, $10 USD on iOS and Busy Contacts is $50 USD on macOS. Are these apps really $110 USD better than Apple’s native apps? I have my doubts.
@Bri I think the main answer, at least in the Apple world, is that Apple has purposely refused to allow upgrade pricing. Apple wants subscriptions because it makes them more money and keeps users and developers locked in.
Some still do release new versions, but then the problem usually becomes that they abandon the current version fairly quickly and save everything for the paid upgrade. That's one reason I stopped using Reeder. After buying it the second time and seeing it quickly start piling up bugs while the updates stopped, I gave up. And sure enough, a new version has just come out.
Some apps just don't have enough room for improvement to justify new paid upgrades.
Really the problem in my mind with Fantastical isn't necessarily the subscription itself, it's the crazy price and as the first poster pointed out, their kind of sleazy method of showing the price.
@Léo To me, the difference is huge. On iOS, Apple Calendar doesn’t let you open locations in Google Maps or set arbitrary alert times (or even 45 minutes). Fantastical’s list interface is much better. On the Mac, the Fantastical mini window and natural language entry are great.
@Bart I think you're probably right about Apple. I can't take anything other than the most cynical view of things when it comes to their management of their app stores.
As to your other points, I would say that a good developer leaves a previous major version of their app in a relatively good state before moving away from it. It should be as free of bugs as is reasonable on the platforms it supports. But I think it's also reasonable that it may stop working if you upgrade your OS. (Part of the reason I *don't* upgrade constantly is because I want the software I have to keep working. Granted this is yet another thing Apple pointlessly makes painfully difficult.)
Also, if a major paid update doesn't make sense for an app, then maybe it shouldn't have one. I understand developers need to make a living -- I'm certainly incentivized to make that argument being that I am a developer -- but sometimes an app just does its one thing well and that's that, and there's no reason to keep milking it.
@Michael
If you relocate to the EU, you will be able to set Google Maps as the default mapping app.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/11/04/apple-will-soon-let-you-set-google-maps-as-default-app-in-the-eu/
;-)
Tower, the excellent Git GUI, was also ported to Windows, but it's not a very good port. It basically looks like a Mac app on Windows.
From years ago, I also remember SourceTree was ported to .NET on Windows, and was OK, but also very slow and buggy. Not sure what the state of that is.
And then there is the tragic story of 1 Password, which started as a great Mac app and was ported to Electron garbage app just to be on Windows.
> So if that works for you, maybe it’s worth considering why a subscription works for indie developers too.
Nobody in any of the posts above yours was complaining about subscriptions as a concept. The complaints were all about cost.
Even assuming that the market was what it was years ago and everybody was willing to pay for software, $285 for Fantastical v4 is completely bonkers. Nobody would pay that. Yet that's essentially what they're charging in their subscription scheme, based on how long it takes them between major versions.
Indie developers are going to hit a wall at some point where nobody is willing to buy subscriptions anymore because of bad actors ruining it for everyone, and Flexibits can explain to their peers their part in this happening.
