Why You Should Pay for Apps

So you just got a smartphone or tablet for Christmas. Great! Now buy some apps. No, not free apps. You, or a special someone, just spent, what, $200-plus on your new gadget? Plunk down $10 for some apps.

Mobile app development is one of the last businesses in America where one or two guys with a great idea can make it big, and where consumers can get a great, original product for little money. Big-box stores have crushed the mom-and-pops. Most culture seems to be created by giant conglomerates. Yeah, there's Kickstarter out there, but Kickstarter tilts the playing field in the other direction. It isn't a store, .

Most transactions in our world are so dispersed along an endless supply chain, that it's impossible to figure out who you're actually paying for what. When you buy a toy at Walmart, how much of your $20 goes to the checkout girl? How much to the person who assembled the toy, how much to the toy's inventor, how much to the truck driver who delivered it? There's no way to know.

Digital media distribution has some of the same problems. I bought Brave on Amazon last night for $20. I assume about 30 percent of that went to Amazon, but of the other 70 percent, how much did anyone actually involved in animating the movie see? How much went to some incomprehensible financial derivative rewarding large Disney shareholders? Once again, no way to know.

I think one of the reasons media piracy is so rampant is that these media products have become so disassociated from any particular creator. Obviously, it takes a team of hundreds, if not thousands, to make a Brave. But that makes too many consumers feel that pirating Brave is a victimless crime, as the "creator" has become this inchoate blob listed on a stock exchange.

Rewarding the Little Guys
Peer into the mobile app stores, on the other hand, and you see a lot of great stuff made by small businesses. Take the "top paid" list at Google Play. Along with the big names, you see great apps from little studios like Mojang, LevelUp, and ZeptoLab. My wife loves World of Goo, by two-man game house 2D Boy. When you buy one of those, you know your money is going to creators. Even better, if they make money, they'll probably make more great apps.

I'm working my way through the Windows Phone 8 game Dragon's Blade right now, and I paid 99 cents for the "DX" version so Nate, the creator, knows he has one more interested player. When you buy a bag of gold in the iPad game Silversword, 70 percent of the money goes directly to pay the rent of a guy named Mario. He lives in Germany. He writes code. He's working hard to bring you an expansion pack right now. This is the kind of transaction you can feel good about.

There's even a perpetual bundle of small-developer games going around, called the Humble Bundle. I don't like the Humble Bundle for stupid reasons, mostly because I associate it with people who live in Brooklyn, have artisanal facial hair, and listen to electronic dance music. I should probably get over that.

If there's a paid version and a free version of something, get the paid version. Remember: if you aren't paying for a product, you are the product. Free versions are worse for you and worse for the creators. You agree to sell your personal data to advertisers. The creator gets some attenuated dribble of cash from the bottom of a complicated pyramid of interests. On the other hand, when you buy the paid version, ka-ching! the creator gets direct cash and knows you're interested.

This logic also holds when you're buying an app from a company like Disney or EA that doesn't give you the warm fuzzies. By purchasing a paid app, you're endorsing a clear, simple economics where you know how and what you're paying. Free apps encourage companies to find invisible ways to "monetize" their users, from selling personal information to demanding perpetual, periodic in-app purchases. You're still paying, you're just rarely told how up front.

Mobile Piracy: Worse Than Desktop Piracy
If you pirate Android apps, on the other hand, you are scum. Yes, there are some outlier justifications: if you're a subsistence farmer in India living on $2 a day and "Where's My Water" is not only an ironic statement of first-world problems, but the slim joy in your sun-blasted day, go for it. But I suspect you're First World middle class, and you spent more than $1 today on something relatively worthless, like a bag of chips. (That's crisps, if you live outside the U.S.)

Mobile apps are so stunningly affordable right now, and the money usually goes so directly to programmers, that you are taking food out of their children's mouths for spite. Really, you can't economize $2 in this week's budget to reward someone for their labor? We're not talking $600 Adobe software suites here, which raise broad questions of affordability. The only reasons to pirate a $2 app are if you're below the UN's global poverty line, or if you're a total a*hole.

I understand some people are hesitant to buy apps because they're worried about quality. That is why we have reviews. PCMag has reviews, Amazon has reviews, the app stores have reviews, 148Apps has reviews, platform fan sites have reviews. Really. Do a five-minute Google search and you'll find out how good an app is.

So go. Take that new , that fresh , or that shiny and pick up a game or an app. It'll be the best buy you made all Christmas, and one you can feel really good about.

OK, Now Which Apps?
We have a lot of lists of great apps on PCMag.com. Here are some to get you started.