One of the better apps on the iPhone for wine in Australia is the James Halliday Wine Companion. While I'm not really a big fan of James Halliday's reviews, there is no doubt he has had a huge impact on the wine industry in Australia. Unfortunately, like many in the wine industry, his grasp on the current environment and technology is terrible and the way his publishing company is running his app is incompetent if not borderline thievery.
The 2012 version of the app was plagued with problems on release. It would crash, you couldn't update it to get updated notes...They finally released a stable version in March of 2012. As far as updated notes were concerned, there wasn't any since January or December and no other notes came out. So pretty poor on his part to not release a few more (why bother saying you'll do it if you don't want to or plan to). Some time in July they lowered the price because the new version of the app was to be released...ok, fair enough.
Apple then released iOS 6.0. Guess what? You could buy the app but it wouldn't work on iOS 6.0. So essentially if you had bought it in July, a couple of months later you couldn't use the app at all. Requests to update their application were ignored.
They then release the newest version of the application which is subscription based. While I have no issues with a subscription based service, what I do have issues with is they've basically had their previous version being sold after iOS 6.0 came out yet they haven't bothered to fix that (2011 still works so in many ways I feel like they broke 2012 intentionally). So you have a history of a problematic application that is now subscription based and a history of not having updated tasting notes...and why should people now subscribe to this? If they had a history of a stable application with constant updates this would be less of an issue..but since they just screwed over their customers, why should anyone trust them? Not to mention the first version of the subscription based one didn't work right...
What I find even more disgusting is because the application was getting hammered by reviewers, they put up a bunch of shill reviews. When you get reviewers talk about how they use it daily (the day the only working version came out) or how it gets updated tasting notes all the time (which is impossible at this point), you know they're shills...It is absolutely one of the most disgusting things I've seen from some that is so highly respected in Australia.
I have a hint for you James Halliday, get a new publisher. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't realize how much damage these guys are doing to your reputation and how much you've ripped off your loyal customers.
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