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0 pointstoddmorey5y ago0 comments

You are talking about a target market's ability to pay, which is a real and important consideration.

I think shimfish is talking more about a market's willingness to pay, which is a very different consideration. You can absolutely poison an otherwise viable marketplace by setting the buyer expectation to be free.

I think "reluctance to spend money on apps" is a big problem on Google Play outside of the population that must chose between a $5 app and food on the table. I've just seen a lot of grumbling among even affluent people about dropping a few dollars on an app when they'll easily spend 3x as much on a single drink. That's a problem in the perception of value.

I wonder if app prices could be more on a sliding scale by geography? Has that been tried?

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shimfish5y ago

Google Play (unlike Apple) allow you to set prices by country.

I don't think the precise pricing is so much the issue though. It's more free vs not free.

PeterisP5y ago

On the other hand, it heavily influences the perception of the platform itself - for a random utility that does something, my expectation is that there will be free apps for that on Android, while the iOS equivalent will cost a couple euros. Multiply that by many apps and that's a reason to choose an Android phone if you want to avoid all these extra fees for every app you'd use. It would be compensated by a richer choice of apps, but it isn't in practice, Android is large enough so that there's a good app for everything anyways.

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