Friends, Romans, Internetmen-and-women-and-any-other-gender-neutral-designations-that-may-be-appropriate-in-a-salutation-such-as-this: Lend me your ears. You may not like what I’m about to say — truthfully, I’m not entirely sure I like it myself — but I promise you, it’s important:

This system we have of paying a few lousy shekels for complex mobile apps? Apps we use and rely on every day, in many cases, and for which we expect to receive eternal upgrades and support? Yeah — that’s gotta go.

I know, I know: The very thought of paying more than three bucks for a piece of software these days is tough to swallow, no matter how much value we may get out of the thing. But as this week’s sale of SwiftKey to Microsoft underscores, that sort of penny-pinching mentality makes it tough for mobile app developers to survive on their own in the long term. And sooner or later, that’s going to turn into a serious problem for us as consumers.

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