As the subject says, can free store apps become paid apps? The reason I ask is because a wallpaper I installed a while back was free and now it costs $2cad. It worries me a bit, because some free apps I rely on may follow a similar path.

Sorry if this was answered before, I searched but did not find an answer.

You bought a wallpaper? Why? There are plenty of free wallpapers online like here: http://nokian9wallpapers.com/

To answer your question, yes, it is possible for free apps to become paid. It depends on the developer.

nokia says you can't, i dunno how that's enforced though.

They redid the publishing site and it seems to let me change an app from free to whatever price I want. Maybe the restriction was removed?

Of course I did not buy a wallpaper, i installed it when it was free. Thanks for the replies, I thought I was imagining things. At the same time this is not the best news, because i can see a situation where a developer would upload an app, use the users for bug testing, wait for it to get popular and then make it paid.

Normally, if the application is open source, you can still get it for free if it will become paid, though with the caveat that you'll have to compile it from source, if the author will pull free binary distribution from the public access. Closed source ones of course aren't protected against such scenario.

For images (which are just static data), once you purchased them (or got under free license) you don't need to pay again anyway, so you can safely rely on what you have already (but you'll need to take care of backing it up yourself).

That happened to QAD Cleaner. Search for it... IIRC, he intended for us community folks to get first dibs on it, then we'd get updates when the price went up to 99 cents USD.

Apparently that didn't work out and he had to create a free version for us folks that had the prior version and had flashed/downloaded before the change and couldn't update without paying.

Something had changed a while back, seems like you can go from free to paid.

I've asked the same questine to nokia store. The answer is YES.
But if you downloaded the app when it's free, you can update it without payment, even through it changes from a free app to a paid one.

so don't worry about that if you have installed them...

When an app is free you can download the deb file. There is nothing to stop users distributing and installing the deb file. So if an app is changed from free to paid without any enhancement, good luck to the developer.

This part i did not research... Where do you get the debs for free apps on the nokia store? I can definitely live with that solution. My main concern is that if i flash the n9 from scratch, and i do a restore, these apps may not be installable if they went to paid.