You're not wrong, but to be honest, no, not very much. It might make an appreciable difference in "conversions" (to using the app) for the Hacker News crowd, but I'm not sure if it's justified in the general case, for these reasons:
1. A lot of the features are oriented around having some identity. There would need to be a lot of special cases in the code to support account-free use.
2. Ultimately the app will be something you have to pay for, so the account is valuable as a lead but also maybe as a proxy for whether or not someone is interested enough to pay for the product eventually.
3. By the time you encounter this you've already downloaded and installed (or at least unpacked) the application. I'm not sure there are a lot of people that go through all that trouble only to balk at registering an email/name/password account. (If nothing else I would think at that point you're already committed due to the effect of the "investment" you've already made on basic human psychology.) And if they do balk at entering an email address, are they the kind of people that are likely to enter a credit-card when the time comes?
For what its worth, most of my competitors make you enter a credit card (and promise to charge you if you don't cancel) before letting you try the product.
That said, I guess it _could_ work with some type of gradual account creation flow (like asking for your name when you've earned a spot on the leaderboard). I'm just not convinced that the return that would provide justifies the effort to make it happen (not to mention the complexity that this would permanently add to ongoing development and testing).
I could easily be wrong about this, but that's been my intuition and rationale around this topic so far.
Do you really think that _that_ many "normal" users that are serious paid-subscription prospects will be lost at that step. I can probably measure that to find out, but its also plausible (and maybe harder to measure) that is a useful way to filter out users that will never pay for the service before they become a support or capacity burden.
I'd immediately delete it. And I have done so with several other applications. Time-limited trials don't need anything other than the time limit and usefulness to make paying customers out of trial downloads.
No, but that's because I saw this thread first. There was no point. And it would have been immediately deleted as soon as it asked for info had I downloaded it.
