[mato]

> Basically: I think free business models can ignore retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and that's why I prefer them.

I think that only holds if you have enough competition that it starts making a real dent in your profit margin.

I don't have any proper data, but pretty much everyone I've met in the sailing community just uses Navionics. Fair enough; the company has been in the ECDIS business for many many years before smartphones even existed, and their electronic charts are good.

Their competitors, based on my subjective use of some of them, more or less fall into two groups:

(1) Similarly big players. Basically just C-MAP (parent is Navico, also in ECDIS for many years).

(2) Startups: savvy navvy and Orca.

I've only really used (1) enough to form a proper opinion. I originally picked it because it was way cheaper (50 EUR/year for global charts), but gave up since Navionics, despite being Fisher Price, at the end of the day just works, is fast, offline, and does not crash. OTOH C-MAP feels like a neglected side-line of the parent company designed to steer you into buying their expensive chart plotter brands (B&G mainly).

To be fair, I also tried a FOSS alternative (OpenCPN), but the app suffers from such a lack of UI design of any kind that I don't even want to go there, so I don't count it as a real competitor. And there's also Imray Navigator which is surprisingly good, but a different product category (raster charts).

TL;DR: Boating is making good money for Navionics, there's not really an alternative, so they don't care.