That's, like... I don't even know. Feels infantilizing to me. Or what am I missing?
The alternative would be to have developers manually specify prices for each region, which wouldn't really scale for a lot of developers (keeping track of exchange rates for 175 different regions is work). Or to do automatic currency conversion from {developer's native country here}, which would eliminate some of the manual work but lead to "ugly" prices in other regions (no x.00 or x.99 pricing), unless they had some rounding scheme to make them look nicer, and then you're almost back at the current price point scheme.
Frankly it doesn't matter what the exact price is. All economics are approximate.
For example, on the surface it seems redundant to have overlapping prices bands
$0.29-$9.99 in $0.10 increments
$0.49-$49.99 in $0.50 increments
$0.29-$9.99 in $0.10 increments
$9.99-$49.99 in $0.50 increments> developers manually specify prices for each region, which wouldn't really scale for a lot of developers
while this also is more aligned to Apple's goals, unless there's also a proven and generalized (geographically and at all price points, app types) observation where the price looking beautiful as 0.99 massively offsets the actual revenue gains of being 1.23.
> "ugly" prices in other regions (no x.00 or x.99 pricing), unless they had some rounding scheme to make them look nicer,
Isn't this change an introduction of those ugly prices? If I'm reading the new rules correctly, Apple now supports prices like 7.39 or 37.40. I guess they don't end in a 1-4 or 6-8, but they aren't the cleanest numbers either. And if that last digit is really the problem, rounding to the nearest 5 is always a possibility.
Your answer may be factually true but it is logically flawed.
Unless there is some marketing value here I suspect it has more to do with making sure they don't lose a half cent of commission rather than benefiting anyone else in any real way.
Here seems make some sense.
Crazy.
Apple sees themselves as a storefront not a payment processor, so maybe the idea is to make things look more consistent as you're scrolling through or comparing multiple apps.
This description may help:
>Developers can set a base price for a storefront and currency they know well, and they will see autogenerated suggestions for prices for other regions and currencies—which they can either accept or replace with their own chosen prices.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/apple-announces-swee...
But originally the App Store was leveraging their existing payment infrastructure e.g. the one they use for iPhone sales. Purchases and invoices were done through SAP which was manually configured to support those price points. It's why you saw weird behaviour e.g. invoices for free app "purchases" and largely the limitations of that system drove what they could and could not do.
Perhaps they've done an overhaul for this system or migrated to a custom built one which is what has enabled all of this new functionality.
I think they just like the simplicity and cleanness in the store. I like it as well.
Are you crazy? And miss out on yet another opportunity for Apple to rub their stank on something?
Fortunately it doesn't seem to apply to IAP so apps will still be able to sell $99 barrels of smurfberries.
Americans have this odd thing of quoting prices without tax which tends to be illegal elesewhere. OK the US does not have a sales type tax on digital goods,
Here’s an example: a base model iPhone 14 is $799. If I go to the Downtown San Francisco Apple Store, it is $868.12; if I go across a bridge to the Berkeley Apple Store it is $880.90; if I go from there across a different bridge to Corte Madera it is $870.91; if I go back through San Francisco down to the neighboring county to the Hillsdale Apple Store it is $875.90; and if I buy it in Cupertino, then it is $871.91. If I cross the State border with Oregon and go to an Apple Store in Tigard or Portland, then it is $799.
Which is the price Apple should be showing on the Apple Store? They tell you at checkout because what you pay at the end is calculated according to your shipping address, and it’s a line item: sales tax, but pricing is also marketing. Which price should Apple be quoting their American customers in national ad campaigns?
Even within a state, sales taxes can vary at the county and municipality level.
To tell an American the full price plus tax they will pay for something, you need to know where they live. For expensive items like computers and phones, the price could vary by tens or hundreds of dollars.
Cui bono?
Personally, I like that US citizens are constantly reminded how much flesh the State is extracting.
I am American, and I don't pay sales tax.
I had a similar conversation with someone on Twitter complaining that the latest iPhone was much more expensive in EU, but once you factored in VAT and some import costs and the fact that apple.com shows the $ price without any sales tax there wasn't actually such a great disparity.
I miss the pre-IAP days.
The old desktop approach of new major versions that people have to purchase periodically is not really feasible on IOS, since old versions would clog up the app store, and there is no way to offer the new versions at a discount to past purchasers, which desktop software likes to do to avoid annoying recent customers when a new version comes out.
So to recover for costs from ongoing development, an app developer will either need to 1) somehow increase the number of people who will purchase the app, 2) add a recurring revenue source like ads to the app (possibly with IAP to disable), 3) make the app subscription based (but only some types of apps can pull this off), or 4) make the app IAP based, and when updating add new features that can be purchased.
Now not every app does any of those. Some will just a single unlock IAP with limited functionality before that. But this is not all that different from the old demo or shareware approach, and the design of the app store makes it generally better to have the demo and full version be the same app, at which point IAP is the way to do that. Without a recurring revenue source though, such apps are likely to either change approach or get abandoned eventually once the costs of periodically upgrading the app exceed the remaining revenue coming in.
----
Also there is the abusive IAP single use item to bypass artificial cooldowns MTX garbage that mobile games tend to be full of, but I really cannot bring myself to accept that as a legitimate business model. Even the Gacha model (terrible as it is) feels somewhat more legitimate, but I have plenty of significant concerns about those too. But I'm really looking at this from the perspective of non-games, or at least not "F2P" games.
To install, try and pay is as easy as to pay, install, and try
To install, try and uninstall is much easier then to pay, install, try, uninstall, and ask for the money back, if the latter us even supported.
What's really bothersome is no option to pay and remove ads. A subscription may be more costly but it's at least honest, and UX is not annoying.
The App Store is a huge market, fortunes have been built, but I know many indie developers who have been reluctant to adopt the F2P model.
As a user, I don't like it either.
So I have no issue with subscribing to many apps I love to fund development, or maybe paying an extra “tip” through IAP. Or just IAP for more content.
But IAP and subscriptions enabled a few models I hate.
Free game (either with ads, IAP, or both) have flooded the App Store and destroyed the market for quality games. Even the better made ones (like Candy Crush) are still designed to wring money out of people.
On the subscription front there are so many scam apps. Buy a calculator app, and pay $5/week for it because they trick people into it.
I’d be happy with no consumable IAPs in games. Or just no IAPs in games at all. And Apple should probably review high subscription prices to find scams. Realistically is there any reason for weekly subscriptions? Maybe just monthly/yearly only.
With IAP, it's really difficult to know what you're getting and how much it will cost you in the end. And reviews may be discussing a completely different app experience. Plus the constant feeling that you're being nickel and dimed.
But I have little interest in games that rely on scammy paid gacha/loot boxes/slot machine mechanics, monetized play-and-wait/energy systems, paid in game currencies, progress paywalls, etc. - not to mention intrusive advertising for monetization schemes. I'm not entirely huge on paid cosmetic options either.
Then again, at this point, Apple is a treasury operation that also sells phones and computers.
I'm guessing you are joking but incase you were not, Apple still makes far far more from selling new products than they do from investments. So that statement is false or misleading.
When you RTFA, you'll learn that Apple is also making it far simpler to manage their app pricing in 45 currencies/175 storefronts. For example:
"Starting today, developers of subscription apps will also be able to manage currency and taxes across storefronts more effortlessly by choosing a local storefront they know best as the basis for automatically generating prices across the other 174 storefronts and 44 currencies. Developers will still be able to define prices per storefront if they wish. The pricing capability by storefront will expand to all other apps in spring 2023."
Additional capabilities are noted in the announcement.
App developers don't want to go choose a competitive price in every one of 174 locales.
But they also don't want to be pricing too high or low for what the local population can afford/is willing to pay.
Let apple do the fancy machine learning to figure out optimal translation tables for each locale to maximize revenue.
So I don’t understand what’s different here.
The VPP was a way for a small company to basically purchase download codes and distribute as needed.
Apple loves design and beauty. Crisp numbers and stability are more user friendly and aesthetic. Also some numbers have implications in certain markets. Seeing numbers like or $69.42 or $444 or $7.23 is just bad all around.
International price conversion while maintaining those is also challenging.
Before attacking Apple policies, it's worth considering why their extremely deep design process might have led to that choice.
Pricing like this:
$7.23 $5.48 $9.21
is just ugly and feels cheap. It's the same reason they have UX standards generally.
Why does anyone care about 1 cent on a $5 purchase? Does anyone here care? The new price points seem to provide enough flexibility with less disadvantage.
From a business perspective, if I had to guess the increased cognitive load would decrease shopping time and increase decision fatigue. I'd also guess that the retail industry has studied this endlessly, and that Apple is basing their pattern partially on this.
This also decreases opportunities for useless psychological price competition and focuses people on quality. Do I want the $1.82 product or the $1.93 product? You probably want the BETTER product.
I think you're probably better off having your prices at $0.99, $2.99, and $5.99 rather than $0.84, $2.72, $5.63, even tho the latter is cheaper, particularly if you are in a large store that has thousands of prices.
Offering a wider range of price points will allow developers to better tailor their pricing to different markets, and it will also give consumers more flexibility when choosing which apps to pay for.
It'll be interesting to see how this change affects the App Store ecosystem in the coming months, and whether it leads to more satisfied users or possibly more predatory subscriptions. The increased flexibility in pricing could be a great benefit for developers and consumers, but I'm going to keep an eye on how it impacts the meta of the pricing models.
EDIT: Not sure why this was flagged/replied to as GPT - I wrote this.
In retrospect I could have not summarized parts of the post, since ideally we've all read from the source information. Live and learn.
I.e. if you bought something that cost $5 you could just hand the $5 to the cashier and they could just avoid ringing you up and pocket the money. In contrast if the object cost $4.99 or $4.95 say they would have to ring it up in the till so they could open it to provide change to the customer.
I heard this on Tom Scott's Podcast "Lateral" recently.
The article says you can. It's one of the "supported conventions".
This looks silly, and many people, including me, have taught themselves to recognize this pattern and round the price correctly without a mental effort.
Some people, of course, fall for it; I suppose younger kids are heavily affected.
I took one look at that and thought "fuck this". If you're a hobbyist with zero interest in making money off your apps, then you get a giant middle finger from Apple.
No ads, no IAP. As a parent it is also handy for the same reasons as far as the kids devices go.
My only issue is as a long time iPhone user they have a lot of games labeled as “+” which means it was previously available but had cost money.
There are many great games, but they’re not with a lot to me as I’ve already played them.
Great for people who hadn’t though.
Reading some of the other comments, it sounds like some people really hate ads and in app purchases
Yes, HN has the rule "*Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but corporate press releases are so awful to read that I increasingly think we need to make them an exception.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
All the more so because they have a strong incentive to bury the lede (I mean in general—not saying that about this announcement), and while third-party sites have other crap incentives, like sensationalism and clickbait, they at least don't do that.
I don't mean to be flippant—you're right that personal opinion is affecting my judgment. I plead that (1) this is inevitable; (2) I do my best to make calls that are good for the community as a whole; and (3) there are vastly more times when I squash my personal preference in favor of #2.
The basic point here is that corporate press releases are their own genre and that that genre goes against HN's mandate at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
HN submissions are usually primary sources, and the HN comments are where you have the discussion. Sometimes even the top voted comment is just a summary of the actual submission, but rephrased to be less biased or more clear. If HN can’t point out the buried lede or explanation and get it upvoted then there’s a larger problem, but in practice I don’t find this to be the case (though maybe I’m wrong).
Does the article provide anything which the HN comment section wouldn’t?
I'm not saying that was the case here, because I didn't read the articles. However, the pattern is so close to universal that it wouldn't be surprising.
Do you want to cater to the most thorough commentators or the masses?
I would second everyone else’s sentiment that going with the official PR statement is better , especially because Apple are really good about fast loading pages without ads, and none of these other sites provide new information that’s not in the press release.
Additionally many of the third party sites are really bad for accessibility, whereas the official Apple one is excellent for those who need readers.
> The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Are you going to verify that the alternative article is accurate and doesn't interpret the official information in a bad way (I mean in general--not saying that about this announcement)?
But in this case I think Appleworld is a poor choice. 9to5[1] are generally much better. Avoid Macrumors and Appleinsider unless it is absolute necessary.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/06/app-store-pricing-changes-dev...
The article you linked is mostly just a copy+paste of the apple page, with a few paragraphs removed.
I personally don't think going from the direct news source -> random news source you just googled that copy+pasted most of it anyway is worth doing.
> but corporate press releases are so awful to read that I increasingly think we need to make them an exception.
Is it really that much better if they just removed 2~3 paragraphs? They added nothing of value other then trackers and ads.
I do ask seriously - does removing 2~3 paragraphs really make it that much better?
Are we really going to move to having one person (no offense) to arbitrarily change the URLs from the official news source to a random one from your google search results?
tl;dr - doing this removes the benefits of first hand reporting, has effectively no different content, and you appeared to have randomly selected one that offers no clear benefit in it's content.
I really prefer the actual PR links myself, corporate BS or not, because that gives me the language I need to then search out the other stories that are based on that PR. If you start with a blog, now I have to do the process in reverse to find the source. I think the HN policies are just fine in this regard. And even if other links can't be collated into a comment, I generally trust HN readers to provide additional information or helpful links when appropriate.
In this case the page links the PR prominently in the first line of copy, so that seems OK.
Would be interesting to know the thought process for doing this.
Even if it were just for iOS and iPadOS though, they do want iPad Pro to compete with desktops in places where expensive software runs. For instance, Grass Valley Livetouch could be done on an iPad.
It does seem like quite a reach but I think there are a few legitimate niche markets for that price point.
So many applications and subscriptions are incredibly expensive when they're priced for the USA which has been over valued for so many years now.
— edit —
Looks like the award goes to an app for Piano Tuners. Find a niche and corner it. $1,000.
* The vast majority of app store revenue is from games.
* A small number of "whales" spend almost all of the money -- presumably rich kids and adults, and people with an unfortunate gambling addiction.
I think it's $300-400 a year for the pair of them? Easy to justify especially in Simply Piano's case, when you consider what even a few weeks of in-person piano lessons would cost (not that it makes such lessons obsolete, but still).
But yeah, outright buying apps or using IAP... ProCreate, Angry Birds (yay! they re-released the original, which is one of the only two of those I care about, finally! Now if I could just get Seasons again...), several tables in Pinball Arcade bought when they were on steep discount just before they lost the licenses to most of the tables I was interested in. I think that's all my App Store purchases, ever, otherwise.
I think most of the money's from "whales" in shitty F2P games.
Canarymail (A mail client which supports SMTP streaming + PGP) - I think was about 30€ lifetime.
StrongBox Pro (A Keepass 2 client) - 80€ Lifetime
ProCreate - 10€ Lifetime
Affinity Designer 1 - 12€ lifetime
FEZ - 5€ Lifetime (Game)
TweetBot - 5€ Lifetime but now abandoned for Subscription Software. Doesn't work anymore, I'm using the normal Twitter App now (became usable over the last few years). The only app where I was disappointed in doing a lifetime purchase. It was abandoned really quickly after my purchgase.
Blitzer Pro - 10€ Lifetime
Threema - 4€ Lifetime
DWD WarnWetter - 2€ Lifetime. Most accurate weather app for Germany
Facetune 1 - 4€ (Didn't fix my face! Surpise!)
Reeder - 5€ RSS Feed App, I use this together with Miniflux Server
My last purchase was in 2021, Reeder. I made most purchases when I got the devices, and all lifetime over SaaS purchases have paid for themselves by now. :)
But honestly, this was more than I expected.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...
Also whilst some employees may find it fun and others on H1B have no choice but working 80+ hours is not sustainable.
So before making conclusions about whether Twitter is some innovative new approach to headcount I would give it a little more time.
The real lie isn't that this was a difficult and costly change for their top-notch team. The real lie is that this works at all - some dev out there is waiting with no fingernails left for the bugs to start pouring in.
This is an effective way to communicate to their developer audience while also keeping their shareholders informed.