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Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#131

Post by super256 »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #64

How many apps have you purchased from the App Store? I have only purchased five apps since 2008. Are people just spending lots of money on apps or am I out of the norm?

I spent ~150€ since 2018, mostly for productive apps.

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.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#132

Post by hackernewds »

varispeed wrote: post #74
black_puppydog wrote: post #66

So, never having bothered with Apple hard-/software I am a bit confused... A developer can't just set a price for something? But then out of the first 10000 natural numbers, Apple semi-arbitrarily select a set of 900 "known-good" numbers that work well for prices? Like, as if the other numbers are somehow bad prices? If you charge someone $7,43 for something, the ghost of Steve Jobs will start haunting you? That's, l…

When selling a product, we were doing A/B tests with price points and so we had results that the same product was selling better if it was priced at £7.49 per month rather than £6.99. For some reason people subconsciously think that 7.49 is smaller than 6.99 or things like £5 wouldn't sell much but £5.99 would be going off the virtual shelves in an instant. Crazy.

How broadly generalizable is that result though?

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#134

Post by hackernewds »

nomel wrote: post #96
aeternum wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No subs and no ads would be great.

I think that would be better covered by a "one time purchase" option. Otherwise, you're asking for either a "starve the dev" category, or something shadier like "show all apps that monetize my location".

There are models that work with barely any ads and subs. Google Maps is a great example.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#135

Post by TAForObvReasons »

kneebonian wrote: post #118
threeseed wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long time ago I used to work at Apple so not sure if it's still accurate. 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 dro…

> 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. Can I just say finding out that Apple uses SAP on the backend is just one of those things that shakes my world view.

Amazon used Oracle until a few years ago, Google accounting teams used Excel, etc.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#136

Post by hackernewds »

pifm_guy wrote: post #78
CharlesW wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10x the number of price points is nuts. 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…

This is the real new feature. 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.

Why isn't that presented as an option then, rather than mandated? I could want to do my own testing

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#137

Post by xxpor »

barumrho wrote: post #91
black_puppydog wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't that work for any price you give them? It's literally a multiplication with a number they pull per-day as the conversion rate. That wouldn't change if the price wasn't one of "their" numbers...

This means that for foreign customers of yours, your product will have constantly fluctuating price. I personally don't find that desirable. Also, there is some considerations to be made for purchasing power especially for items like apps. $1 might be trivial in the US, but it may not be so in a third world country.

They could offer stickiness settings, like only change the price once the FX rate has moved 10%.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#138

Post by intrasight »

howinteresting wrote: post #103
Overtonwindow wrote: post #64

How many apps have you purchased from the App Store? I have only purchased five apps since 2008. Are people just spending lots of money on apps or am I out of the norm?

According to the Epic v. Apple decision: * 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.

This is why I find it so baffling that there are so many devs/companies chasing the golden ring of app revenue with sincerity when clearly is a very warped marketplace. What types of useful, non-scam apps do people look for and buy that lead devs to believe there's some opportunity? Why create it as an app and deal with all that BS when you could just make a nice web site/PWA?

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#139

Post by hackernewds »

jtsiskin wrote: post #63
ryandrake wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it be that anyone in the world falls for this anymore? My daughter recognized this obvious pattern when she was 7 years old: "It's $5, dad, why don't they just say $5?" I wonder if pricing something at $4.99 have anything more than a vague subliminal effect these days?

Imagine two apps you’re scrolling by in the App Store. One is $5, the other is $4.99. Barely going attention (essentially picking subconsciously rather than consciously), you choose one to click first. What are the odds you clicked the $4.99 one?

Zero

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#140

Post by BudaDude »

fckgw wrote: post #95
redtriumph wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The application was removed from the App Store without explanation by Apple the day after its release, August 6, 2008" Would be interesting to know the thought process for doing this.

It generated support complaints and provided no value to the user.

The value is there. People buy useless shit all of time to show off their wealth. Is there any difference between having a $10,000 app or having a $100+ cosmetic skin in a game?
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