Questionable Business Practices – TextMask Review

I normally like all of this developers apps and I have purchased the ad-free upgrades for most of them to show my gratitude. But, I find something very troubling in certain in-app purchase upgrades for sale in these apps. Particularly pertaining to the font upgrades this developer offers. All of the fonts in use in this application, free or paid ones, are all royalty-free, public domain fonts. This means that the developer goes and scours the Internet and downloads fonts that are free to everyone and puts them in this app for use. Which would be fine until you start charging for the app outright, or in this case charge for the public domain fonts themselves in an upgrade. Pretty much all licenses for these royalty-free and public domain fonts states that the user of the font is allowed to use the font for personal and commercial use. But, a good majority of them explicitly state that the only thing you are not allowed to do with the free fonts, is take them and sell them individually or as a package. So, the developer of this app did not create or buy the fonts that he is selling. But, he is most likely breaking many terms of use agreements by selling these free fonts via IAPs. I haven't looked at the TOS for every single one of the fonts included in the IAP pack available here. But, I would be hard pressed to believe that none of the fonts included did not state in their respective TOS that you are not allowed to sell the public domain or royalty-free font. Public domain you most likely could sell. But, I still find it kind of shady and unethical that this developer is charging money for fonts that can be had for free by anybody who goes and searches for any of them on the Internet. Just my two cents regarding these IAP font packs. Other than that, though, I find this to be a pretty decent application and it lives up to its description. Which is why I still gave it three stars even though I find the IAP font packs somewhat questionable. I should also point out that I find it amusing that the app is set up so that you cannot install fonts that are already installed. Which, well, that makes technical sense. But, I tried to install one of the fonts included in the IAP font pack, and it, of course, wouldn't let me. Because like I said, any of the fonts included in the IAP font pack are readily available for free for anyone to download on the Internet, just put any of the fonts listed in the IAP pack, such as "Chawp font download" into a search engine and you will most likely find that font available for free download. So, I just thought that was humorous. So, if you never knew that there were free fonts available on the Net, now you do and you can download the zipped font file and "Open In" using an app like "Archives" and then proceed to install those fonts into any compatible apps listed on your iPod, iPhone or iPad. You can, of course, also download these royalty-free/public domain fonts and use them in apps like Microsoft Word or any number of others apps on your Linux, Mac or Windows computer.
Review by Joshua D. on TextMask.