Ethical questions of Speech Central marketing

As multiple people have asked questions regarding the ethical side of Speech Central marketing, I will post regarding that and I won't discuss this topic further.

First I do confirm that I did a competitor comparison marketing. I also understand that for some people it may be controversial.

Second I have not invented this and I have done it in much lighter form than most of the companies do. Apple had series of commercials for years of PC and Mac guy when it literally mocked Microsoft. Microsoft did the same when it wanted to present Surface devices as superior solution. I have never ever mocked up Voice Dream Reader and I have tried to my best to do only objective comparisons. You can see in my comparisons that Voice Dream Reader is better than Speech Central for some specific purposes.

Third, the only reason that I did this is because I was exposed to a wide social ghosting by community leaders (and even some members of the community), which is also a form of bullying by all standards.

When I say that let's look into some facts, one by one:
- Speech Central was in active development for almost 10 years. I dedicated 10 years of my life to improve accessibility.
- There wasn't a single blind user who have tried the app and who didn't say that the app is reasonably capable and could be compared to Voice Dream Reader. You can see various independent posts on this web site that confirm that.
- I have made my app completely free when used with VoiceOver to help this community. I commit to stay like that as long as I own the app (as Winston I will get old one day and I can't develop it forever, but I hope to do it for few more decades)
- I am the first to encourage the people to try all apps and use any app that they like. I am aware that not everyone will pick Speech Central even if it is free and Voice Dream Reader costs 60$/year, and I am fine with that.
- But the truth is that this community leaders (and sometimes even members) encourage restriction of choices to only one or two apps and social ghosting of developers that bring new choices.
- Don't you find it odd that there are literally thousands of web pages that promote Voice Dream Reader to blind people in various forms - podcasts, articles, links to recommended software and literally just a couple of them that mention Speech Central? Again I wouldn't mind even review that would completely trash Speech Central based on something objective, but there isn't that, there is just ghosting that lasts for many years.
- I have sent probably thousand of emails so that some people that review the apps for blind people would take a look at Speech Central. Maybe just three of them did that. It should be their job to test different solutions and review them for the community even without any email, but they prefer ghosting.
- Just for the comparison I frequently recommended my app to people on Twitter that were looking for Speechify and NaturalReader (apps that are generally not used in this community). I have received many thanks for that and not a single insult. For Voice Dream Reader I have sent at least 100x fewer tweets and I couldn't count the insults for promoting the choice.
- Finally I'll tell you on the episode of how Bookshare has ghosted me as their partner app (yes even that can happen). I must stress that this wasn't right from the start and initially I had a very good communication with one their employee that soon left the organisation. After that strange things started to happen. My test account stopped to work, so I couldn't test or implement new features (according to them this was because they have changed some their policies and I needed to sign something to have access again, but they have around 10 partner apps and they haven't informed me regarding that). As Apple requires demo account for testing by App Review, I got into the problem that I couldn't pass the app review anymore. I had a solution either to get a test account or to remove the feature. I had emailed to them through all contact forms on their web site and all other emails I have ever had or could find and I have never received an answer. I considered to purchase the account to be able to pass the app review, but it was impossible. I had to complain to their parent organisation Benetech that they were ghosting my messages at which point I've got the reply and the form to fill to get the test account.
- To conclude I don't mind if someone says "I have tried Speech Central and it is that bad because of this and this that you would need to pay people to use it". But I do mind people that say Winston deserves 60$/year for his work and from their silence you can conclude that I don't deserve anything for the same work. Not even few minutes of time required to try the app and use it for free if you like it. I don't say that all people here act like this and I think that majority don't, but for those that do they do perform a form of implicit bullying.

Let's end it by saying that it is true that my marketing wasn't up to the highest possible standards. I understand that now is not the time to expect words like sorry from anyone. But I do hope that in 10 years someone will come back here and say that I helped the blind community more than most people and I did not deserve to go through everything that I went through.