[fburnaby]

Someone has made and maintained the app over a few person-months of effort, and can sell millions of copies of it. In order to pay for their time spent making the app, I need to give them one millionth of the cost of their time developing it. When there's lots of competition in the app market, app makers will have to sell their time at competitive prices.

Compare that to coffee. There are three baristas on this street who can make me a coffee, so they're also in a stiffly competitive market. But they have to make me my coffee personally, one at a time. I have to buy a larger portion of their time, since they can only make a few dozen coffees per hour (and they have more physical supply-chain issues to manage, like sourcing beans and managing a property).

It's emotionally easier to pay for the coffee in part because no-one down the street is offering it for half the price, or for free. They can't. An app developer can. And they'll have to, because if they don't, someone else will. Because they can.