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There are hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store, most of which are terrible. Imagine how many would be in there if there was no $100 fee.
There are hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store, most of which are terrible. Imagine how many would be in there if there was no $100 fee.
Think of the children. I mean, seriously, how many of us were young highschool hackers who would have just loved the opportunity to build something awesome for smartphones. But would be halted by Apple's fine?
I see the developer fee as just a barrier to entry to submit apps to the marketing place - kinda just to stop the riff-raff. I suspect it also is linked to the the legal agreement as some type of consideration.
As is, they seem to want you to pay up even to deploy an app you wrote onto your own phone. That's just obnoxious. (Googling around, I can find workarounds, but most seem to require jailbreaks or other strange mummery; see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/246422/how-can-i-deploy-a... for a procedure that's alleged to work without requiring that, but which does require other undocumented mummery with certificates.)
Also, it keeps a lot of people from learning to tinker in ways that could develop into job skills later. While $100 is probably a nuisance fee to most of the people posting here, there are a lot of people in the US (to say nothing of the rest of the world) for whom it blows their hobby budget for the month, if not for the year.
There are hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store, most of which are terrible. Imagine how many would be in there if there was no $100 fee.
Shouldn't better search or discovery algorithms or UI, be a more elegant solution than just brute-forcing a paywall into it? Think of the children. I mean, seriously, how many of us were young highschool hackers who would have just loved the opportunity to build something awesome for smartphones. But would be halted by Apple's fine?
This is only a problem for people who plan to make <$100 from their app
Which includes 100% of freeware, and 99% of weekend "hey let's put this on the net and see if people want it" projects. Both of those things used to be a big part of the Mac software ecosystem, but they're slowly dying away. And if Apple moves forward with its apparent plan to prohibit unsigned code from running by default, while charging $99/year for the privilege of having your code signed, both will be effectively…
There are hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store, most of which are terrible. Imagine how many would be in there if there was no $100 fee.
Shouldn't better search or discovery algorithms or UI, be a more elegant solution than just brute-forcing a paywall into it? Think of the children. I mean, seriously, how many of us were young highschool hackers who would have just loved the opportunity to build something awesome for smartphones. But would be halted by Apple's fine?
That's always the dream, but recommendation algorithms are hard. And can get much harder when you have a small number of positives, which is presumably what would happen if Apple removed the fee.