Daniel J. Gonzalez posted:H1000,
You are right, those providers came up with that method of doing business, I cant blame MTH for that.
I can blame them though for not giving the customer options. I can also blame them for knowing the Google/Apple way and not only jumping on board with it but also, not coming up with a better solution.
It's also not to late for them to fix it, but I'm sure they would rather just keep collecting $25.
I also forgot to mention that the app also has a cost to run. Ever time Google/Apple decide to come up with a new OS, guess who has to pay for an engineer to fix the app so that it can run on/conform to the new OS. So updates not only are required when MTH comes out with a new feature (the remote also would need an update in this case) but also when the OS provider decides they too want to add me features. (The remote does not).
That isn't entirely true with OS. There are times when OS are updated that an older app can run into compatibility problems, but in general unless the application is really, really old, they will run fine on new versions of the OS,they engineer some level of backwards compatibility into the OS (they aren't IBM, that used to love to upgrade OS on their mainframes then force users who wanted to upgrade to buy all new software). If the MTH app were to use some new feature in IOS or Android, they would release a new version of it to take advantage of it, but in most cases a new OS level allows an application written to an older standard to work just fine. Not to mention that if a user is using a 'locked down' 25 buck tablet, they aren't likely to update the OS. If MTH stops supporting that version of Android or IOS, then the user may need to get a new tablet if they can't upgrade the one they have to one that is supported, but usually vendors support several levels of OS with their apps.
