Rain Alarm 4+

In a previous version that i paid for the app had settings to view the previous eight hours rain radar, this was a handy feature as a groundsman to see what conditions might be like in a location away from where i may have been at the time.
It was a farmer who put me on to this app many years ago & i suspect they will be missing this feature also.
I was hoping it would be in the pro version but sadly it is not.
The app creators have kindly honoured my original purchase & i now have the pro version.

Hi, thanks for your review. Rain Alarm XL had to be discontinued 6 years ago and there was no way for us to move the users to the new Pro version. Please, contact us at rainalarm[at]avilessoftware.com and we will sort this out for you. Nobody expects you to pay twice for the same.

I paid for adverts to be removed from this app some time ago as I found the 8 hour animated display very useful. They have now downgraded the animation to be a small fraction of what it was and you now have to pay extra to get the 8 hour animation back. Without the 8 hour window I do not find the app useful. The developer thinks that this is fair because they say I only paid for adverts to be removed. I think this is not fair because I paid for adverts to be removed only because I found its features useful. If those features are removed then it is no longer the app that I paid to remove ads from. If I pay to unlock the features I used to enjoy there would seem to be no guarantee that they won’t remove more features and place them behind additional pay walls in the future. It’s a good app, but I strongly object to the practice of moving essential features behind a pay wall after one has paid to remove ads from those features. If the legacy features were unlocked for the legacy users that paid to remove ads from them then I would of course amend my review, until then; one star, buyer beware.

Hi edburton,

thanks for using the app. Not so many thanks though for the inaccuracies and the accusation of not being trustworthy and the implicit statement that we are cheating our users.

I'll try to clarify some things. Here's the first one:

You have never paid for this app because it is a free app. 

You probably paid for removing the ads. Until recently this was the only possible in-app purchase.

We have now added more features and some that were for free are now paid. These features that were for free had to be charged for now because they were causing high operational costs. In order to unlock all these paid features at once you have to buy the Additional Settings item. It only costs 1$ for all this to be unlocked. We have also added new free features, like the Apple Watch Extension or the ability to snooze the alarm for 1 or 2 hours.

Now, you and all other users of this App have all the guarantee in the world that if you pay for something, we are not going to take that away from you. In your case, since you paid for removing the ads, you are still without ads. You paid for that, you keep that.

What we can't guarantee is that when we make changes, these are going to be fully understood by everybody. When making changes to an app there is always the risk of misunderstandings and that surely has happened in your case. We could have done a better communication, that is probably the cause of all this anger. That's on us and we apologize for that.

In any case, what we are not going to accept is a completely out of line accusation of us not being trustworthy. This is completely unacceptable and I request you to reconsider your review and to rephrase it. You can criticize all you want (and we welcome criticism) but trying to harm our reputation on purpose is not acceptable and makes your review not trustworthy.

I would have rated this 5 star, except a serious problem has recently appeared which is when the app window pops up the countdown and subsequent X close button are obscured by the battery status bar on an iPhone 10 and it is not possible to close the and at all, rendering the app inoperative. Frustrating as otherwise it was a functional little app with what felt like a reasonable balance between the intrusion of paid ads and usability on this free version.

Hi, I am sorry about the ad problem. It is completely unintentional on our side. If it happens again, could you please send us a screenshot so I can forward it to our ads provider? Thanks for using out app!