Lite iPhone Apps Are Dead: In-App Purchases Come to Free Apps

Until now, the in-app purchases intro'd with iPhone 3.0 were restricted to pay applications—presumably, over concerns of bait-and-switch tactics. Well, now developers can ask you to buy stuff in free apps, too, effectively allowing upgrades for free apps.

What that means, as Apple says, is that it eliminates the need to create "Lite" versions of apps, since devs can sell content, subscriptions, services and upgrades from free apps. The change sounds trivial, but it's actually a fundamental alteration of the App Store economy.

It effectively creates free trial apps, which couldn't be done before. Originally, free apps had to be standalone, fully functional apps, with very limited pestering to buy a premium version. At the point, you would go and purchase a separate, paid application. Now, developers can ship a single app with limited functionality that's completely unlocked when you pay the full purchase price. Or slip subscriptions or other services into free apps.The whole free vs. paid app is a completely different kind of calculus now.

We'll see what ultimately happens with this—especially 'cause we won't know what kind of invisible rules Apple will be enforcing—and whether it's a power that gonna be used mostly for good or for evil, but stuff's gonna start looking a lot different in the App Store.

Send an email to matt buchanan, the author of this post, at matt@gizmodo.com.

WHO CAN YOU TRUST?

Any time you meet a human being and become associated with him socially, it would be of some benefit to know, by looking at him and talking to him for a couple of minutes, what this individual had in store for you in his friendship with you.

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by Patrick Howson

Computer-Based System To Crack Down On Casino Card Counters

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Yahoo Tech outlining a system currently being researched:"Card counting is perfectly legal — all a counter does is attempt to keep track of whether the cards remaining in a deck are favorable to his winning a hand (mainly if there are lots of tens and aces remaining in the deck) — but it's deeply frowned upon by Vegas casinos. Those caught counting cards are regularly expelled from casinos on the spot and are often permanently banned from returning. But given the slim house odds on Blackjack, it's often said that a good card counter can actually tip the odds in his favor by carefully controlling the way he bets his hands. And Vegas really doesn't care for that. The anti-card-counter system uses cameras to watch players and keep track of the actual 'count' of the cards, the same way a player would. It also measures how much each player is betting on each hand, and it syncs up the two data points to look for patterns in the action. If a player is betting big when the count is indeed favorable, and keeping his chips to himself when it's not, he's fingered by the computer... and, in the real world, he'd probably receive a visit from a burly dude in a bad suit, too. The system reportedly works even if the gambler intentionally attempts to mislead it with high bets at unfavorable times."It's not developed in Vegas, though, according to the brief description (the other projects are also interesting) from the University of Dundee's release, but rather in conjunction with the Dundee Casino.

by timothy