I'd be happy to use an app store that tracks active screen-time per app and disburses a monthly "subscription" proportionally to the developers of all the apps I use.
I don't have any concern about the type of currency used to pay.
A quick check of my screentime over the past few days shows only two apps which wouldn't benefit from this: DAVx and Syncthing. Both of these are essentially daemons I configured once, and ideally never see the app interface of ever again until I get a new phone. Otherwise, apps I benefit from are represented in the screentime of the past couple days.
I've started developing something like that, and I started by noticing like you that basing on screentime isn't fair to apps that are purely in background, so I tried to compensate for that.
Then I found that some apps, even though they were useful, didn't actually do much under the hood. Like say Frost for Facebook which is mostly a webview with few extensions. So I wanted to add a section for things that are mostly a "viewer". An additional example of such a thing is a media player: if you look 10h a day at videos, it's thanks to the content, not to the viewer.
And then, there are behaviours you maybe don't want to trigger, like getting people addicted. 2048 using the screentime metric would have gained a lot of money (and it does deserve a lot!), but IMO people who got addicted to it should give them less.
And what about apps that have paying variant on Google Play?
Which deserves more money, the app that is simply free on fdroid and Play Store, or the app that is free on fdroid, but paying (or free reduced) on Play Store.
So, I spent few days trying to make something fair, and at the moment I believe that the most fair I can do is to give equally among all apps that I've used in the last 7 days.
This may result in applications trying to keep you hooked in, addicted, or having unnecessarily long processes.
Subscriptions make sense for dynamic content, and service. Fantastical and 1Password are examples of subscription-based platforms which were once buy to play (term from games industry).
However if you self host the data (you probably can and should) or sell your soul to the devil (Google etc) you paid for hosting. So a subscription for the software doesn't make sense from customer PoV. You essentially don't pay for service, compared to Disney+, World of Warcraft, or Netflix.
> I'd be happy to use an app store that tracks active screen-time per app and disburses a monthly "subscription" proportionally to the developers of all the apps I use.
Screentime is a really, really bad proxy for usefulness though. Weather apps, email clients, maps (without turn-by-turn directions), the alternative app I use to control my Hue lights, ... will starve, while the Kindle app and social media will get showered in money. That alternative camera app, hardly any screentime at all. My to do app shows me lots of notifications but gets very little screentime. Netflix however...
I wouldn't want any monitoring of which applications I use. In any case, such an incentive would make developers of apps that should have quick, fast actions do things to make the apps slower. For example, if it takes a user 1s to use the app, they'll add a 0.5 sec animation to open it and 1.5x their money and so on.
And those seconds will be dominated by the tens of minutes I spend in other apps per day. And Android and iOS already monitor which apps you use. The calculation of ratios could easily be done locally.
> And Android and iOS already monitor which apps you use.
I know that. I don't want it as I stated above.
> And those seconds will be dominated by the tens of minutes I spend in other apps per day.
That was just an easy to understand example. The real money will be in maxing out total screen time. Such examples exist as Facebook, Netflix, or advertising driven platforms that hyper-optimize for watch-time or "engagement" to our detriment.
I don't have any concern about the type of currency used to pay.
A quick check of my screentime over the past few days shows only two apps which wouldn't benefit from this: DAVx and Syncthing. Both of these are essentially daemons I configured once, and ideally never see the app interface of ever again until I get a new phone. Otherwise, apps I benefit from are represented in the screentime of the past couple days.