Paper drops in-app purchases to encourage you to buy a Pencil
Paper, the sketching app that was born from the ashes of Microsoft's Courier project, has become a must-have for all would-be artists. If there was one annoyance, however, it's that you could only use one brush and a limited color set, which you could expand only with paid upgrades. If, however, you bought one of the company's $49.95 Pencil styluses, the tools would become available to you for free. From today, however, Pencil is abandoning the in-app purchase model, enabling every user to sketch, watercolor and write with the software.
If you're asking yourself how the company is planning to continue to make money, it's all in the hardware. According to FiftyThree, Pencil is the most popular stylus on the planet, and as such, will now focus efforts in that direction. The corporate release heralding the news also mentions that the pairing is popular with teachers and students, so we can probably expect a bevy of education-focused announcements in the future. Oh, and since the Walnut version of the Pencil was so well-received, the company has now produced a $59.95 Gold edition that'll blend in nicely with your baller iPad.
