Chris Pirazzi

The truth never applies when one is making so much money at the expense of students, when this is in fact not necessary, and does not really make more money for this company in reality.

Well I can sympathise with your frustration and I'm a bit confused on whether you're saying we're making money or we're not making money, but I definitely see the root of the problem here: you are assuming the Thai dictionary market is profitable I can personally guarantee you that there are no skyscraper offices or junkets to the Bahamas and that we are happy if we can break even on our significant development costs.

Seriously though, I will respond here to everyone the same as I did to your similar private email.

To set some context here, we were discussing our policy of charging separately for each platform, which is described here (in the FAQ for each platform):

http://word-in-the-hand.com/thaidictandroid_faq.html#upgradeother

It says:

Do I get free lifetime upgrades to other platforms (e.g. Android/Windows)?

Can I get a discount for upgrades to other platforms (e.g. Android/Windows)?

Can I trade in my older version on another platform for this platform?

A: Currently there is no way to transfer a purchase or get a discount for a new purchase across platforms (e.g. between Windows, Apple iOS (iPhone/iPad), or Google Android phones and tablets).

One reason why we cannot do transfers or discounts is that Apple, Google, and PayPal are mortal enemies and they don't give us any way to transfer the licensing permission. Apple and Google also do not give us any way to offer discounts for individual customer purchases.

But there is another, more fundamental reason why we do not offer free license transfers or discounts: each time we have moved to a new platform (from Palm OS to Windows desktop to Apple iOS to Google Android) we had to completely re-write the app from scratch, because each platform uses a software development system that is completely incompatible with the previous platform. In some cases, we even had to rewrite our app in a completely different computer language! Unfortunately, platform designers like Microsoft and Apple and Google do this on purpose in a futile and counter-productive attempt at locking developers onto their platform, and this trend is almost certain to continue as new platforms emerge.

The net effect of this reality is that each time we move to a new platform, it incurs massive development costs (at least 3 and often 6 months of full-time software engineer labor).

The simple financial reality is that we need to recover those development costs so that we can continue to provide free upgrades for everyone on every platform, both existing and new! Because we have a large base of customers who also upgrade their devices to each new platform, we cannot fund continued development of all our supported platforms using only the purchases of new users on the new platforms. The numbers simply do not add up, and we would not be able to continue to support you if we did not charge across platforms.

We understand that from your point of view, you can only use one platform/device at a time, so it seems like you should only pay once. We hope you will understand that from our point of view, we need to pay for our programming time so we can continue to develop the app and add new features and new vocabulary for you and all our other users on all platforms.

You mentioned an example of a company, NJStar, which sells a Windows+Mac Chinese dictionary that offers one price for the two platforms. And I pointed out another example in the language space---the fantastic Chinese dictionary Pleco---that offers free upgrades across platforms starting with PalmOS, going through Windows Mobile, all the way to iPhone and Android. I definitely remember Mike Love, the very awesome creator of Pleco, lamenting the lack of new customers (specifically, new customers who download the free version then upgrade to paid) on iPhone and Android on his user forum, so I'm not sure if he still believes that the good will generated exceeds the loss of new sales.

Clearly, there is no industry-standard policy on upgrades. Ultimately, I think it just comes down to properly setting expectations for our customers.

Each time we add platforms (e.g. Palm to Windows to iPhone and Android to whatever comes next), we get about 10-20 emails requesting free or discounted upgrades. We point out our FAQ item, and then about 2-3 of those people end up being angry or passionate about wanting free upgrades, with the rest responding that they understand and are happy to support us further so that they can continue to get good support and upgrades. It is impossible to make everyone happy, but it is clear the vast majority of our customers see no problem with paying for upgrades because they see the quality of the product and the support that comes out of it. So I don't think it's a big crisis and I feel our main responsibility is to make the policy clear before the customer purchases the first time. That is why we included the item above in all of our product FAQs and we make it clear in our product descriptions that the free upgrades apply to the same platform.

There may be lots of examples of companies that offer free upgrades across platforms (although I think it is fair to say that most cross-platform software is not free across platforms), but you must also consider their different contexts. This is not song and dance; it's a basic financial reality. One major factor to consider is how much engineering cost it takes for the vendor to cross platforms. NJStar's example of Windows to Mac tends to be a lot easier (less costly) than iPhone to Android and definitely easier than desktop to mobile, but the actual cost depends on what the app does and the details of how the vendor wrote their older code. We and Paiboon Publishing spent more than 10 person-years of labor developing our dictionary dataset from scratch, and we spent a similar amount of time doing engineering for the various platforms. An even more important factor to consider is that the Thai learning market is miniscule, especially compared to Mandarin, and saturation is a real issue. The number of people who want to learn Thai seriously enough to spend $25 is tiny. We know that a huge percent of our customers move from platform to platform with us, and based on the sales curves we can surmise that we really are near or at the point of saturating the market (whereas saturation may be impossible for such a huge market as Mandarin learning), so we are not in the same financial boat as Pleco or NJStar. They always have room to grow, but we are selling to a very, very small group and we seem to be getting near to covering all of them that might buy. If we instituted a policy that lost us the majority of new sales on a new platform, we would be out of business immediately. That would be no good for our customers.

We want to keep adding more and more vocabulary and features and we believe this is the only financially viable way to do it. We present our offering to our customers with a clear description of the price, features, and upgrade policy and let our customers decide by purchasing or not purchasing. The vast majority seem quite satisfied.

Hello,

This is Chris Pirazzi from Word in the Hand, makers of the dictionary app along with Paiboon Publishing. Thanks for your kind words about our app.

I just heard about this Thaivisa post from another customer....I'm not sure who you tried to contact before, but we are happy to help in any way we can. You can send email any time to [email protected]

As the other helpful posters ont his thread have mentioned, it sounds like you are having issues getting through the payment system of Google Play Store and Google Wallet.

We can offer a few other suggestions that might help the purchase go through. These suggestions apply to any paid app on Google Play.

We have many non-Thais buying from Thailand every day so we can say it is common and possible to buy Play Store apps that way. I definitely apologize for the purchase frustration; believe it or not we also have the same frustration! As an Android app developer I'd love to be able to say that I can log in, find your purchase, and click a button to make it just go through. But sadly and surprisingly, Google gives us app developers almost zero visibility to, and control over, purchases in the Google Play Store. In fact, Google no longer even lets us app developers know the names or emails of our customers so that we may assist them, and now they only show the city or country of the customer! Google made this change with privacy in mind, but I don't think they considered the impact on sales support.

The purchase can fail at several levels, including at the Google Play Store level and at the level of your credit card company.

The first thing to do, even if the error message doesn't seem to warrant it, is to contact your credit card company and get a definitive answer on whether they have seen any purchase failures or not. If they did, then they can usually help you resolve the situation immediately. We have seen cases where folks traveled to Thailand but didn't tell their credit card companies, or their credit card companies flagged fraud for some other reason and all you have to do is tell them not to do so again for that particular vendor or for a particular time period.

If the credit card company didn't see anything, you need to contact the next layer of folks who have actual authority over and access to your purchase on the Play Store: Google Play Store / Google Wallet.

These seem to be the most relevant "contact us" links:

This one has a telephone link for Google Wallet where apparently they call you:

https://support.google.com/wallet/contact/general_c2c?ctx=ef

And this one for Play Store has an "Email Us" link at the very bottom and also says:

1. "For your protection, Google cancelled this order. The transaction was considered fraudulent."
   • If we suspect fraudulent activity, orders will be automatically cancelled to prevent unwanted charges on your account. If the issue persists, please let us know below so we can work on resolving the issue.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/topic/3365284?hl=en&ref_topic=3364672#contact=1&ts=3006597,3038563,3038916

When you contact them, of course the first thing they will do is blame your credit card company, but you will be armed with the fact that the credit card company did not see any purchase attempts.

There are a few things you can try without contacting Google, but they are long shots. You can try to make the purchase from a different network (e.g. different ISP) or a different physical location. If you happen to have access to a VPN or proxy server (e.g. through work) then making the purchase again through a proxy in the US or other Western country may resolve the problem that is making Google Play (or your credit card company) incorrectly conclude that fraud is going on. Or if you have a trusted friend/family in a Western country you can read the card info to them to make the purchase.

In the future we hope to free ourselves of Google Play. In addition to the purchasing hassle it causes for a small percentage of customers like you, the Google Play Licensing support is flaky and a small percent of customers lose access to the app when offline (though we did find workarounds for many cases of this and they are on our FAQ). We hope to kill two birds with one stone and switch to a more reliable system sometime next year.

Please contact us by email and we can try to help further.