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

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

#181

Post by parker_mountain »

alexandre_m wrote: post #174
decadancer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's a bad practice. I'm Russian and Steam games are (were) 1.5x-2x times cheaper for Russia compared to Europe and Americas, even before regional passes. I don't know whether that was responsiblity of devs or storefront, but it seemed quite a fair and profitable practice, because the price point you are willing to pay for a game (or an app) is different for people from different economical and cultur…

The economics of all of that seem sketchy to me. It sounds like the main North American market is subsidizing the apps being produced and sold worldwide. Does the same logic apply for other virtual good such as digital music elsewhere?

> the main North American market is subsidizing the apps being produced and sold worldwide

I think you'll find that this has been the practice for many decades. A stark example is medicine pricing.

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

#182

Post by TillE »

kergonath wrote: post #171
vanshg wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That should be for the merchant to decide, though, not Apple

Apple is the merchant.

Yes that's one of the key services you get in exchange for 30%. Small companies really don't want to be handling sales tax requirements for every jurisdiction on the entire globe, it's a nightmare. Not to mention fraud, etc.

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

#183

Post by toast0 »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #149
JonathonW wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple uses price points rather than having developers explicitly specify prices because they're currency-independent: you specify a price point and Apple chooses appropriate prices for each of the ~175 different storefronts where your app could be available. Apple then periodically adjusts the international prices as exchange rates fluctuate, to keep them in parity with the US prices at the same tiers. The alternativ…

You would think a company like Apple could easily build a system that updated exchange rates daily and could do the simple math on any price. Having "price points" seems arbitrarily and stupid.

Otoh, there's value in prices holding still for at least a while. And 'pretty' prices are appealing in general. You obviously can't hold prices still forever, but daily prices is probably not paletable.

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

#184

Post by shortstuffsushi »

richrichardsson wrote: post #156
kybernetyk wrote: post #90

Will this solve the issue that the $49.99 tier equals to a 59.99 EUR price? I get a ton of messages every week by would-be Euro customers complaining why the fuck I am fleecing them with a 59.99 EUR price when the US price is $49.99 and the exchange rate is currently roughly 1:1.

VAT, everyone forgets about it. 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.

As an American who deals in no VAT ever, is something like a 20% vat (10 on 50) normal?

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

#185

Post by bmicraft »

simonw wrote: post #169
hitpointdrew wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think a company like Apple could easily build a system that updated exchange rates daily and could do the simple math on any price. Having "price points" seems arbitrarily and stupid.

They could do that, but then users in some countries would have to pay 0.693 of their local currency or whatever. Why should the US be the only country that gets friendly looking prices?

Or just let the dev specify if they want to round prices to some precision?

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

#186

Post by r00fus »

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.

From one of my internal contacts who worked there & had to actually interface with the SAP implementation:

1) It's one of the largest SAP deployments in the US if not the world

2) SAP (at the time) was the only one who could offer an ERP that scaled to do what Apple wanted.

Homegrown enterprise software is one of those things that sounds great until you realize you're re-inventing a lot of code dealing with regulations (tax/hr legal) that is other companies bread & butter so it's worth "paying their price" rather than getting it wrong and being on the wrong side of litigation/legislation.

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

#187

Post by jonasdegendt »

alexandre_m wrote: post #174
decadancer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's a bad practice. I'm Russian and Steam games are (were) 1.5x-2x times cheaper for Russia compared to Europe and Americas, even before regional passes. I don't know whether that was responsiblity of devs or storefront, but it seemed quite a fair and profitable practice, because the price point you are willing to pay for a game (or an app) is different for people from different economical and cultur…

The economics of all of that seem sketchy to me. It sounds like the main North American market is subsidizing the apps being produced and sold worldwide. Does the same logic apply for other virtual good such as digital music elsewhere?

Entire reseller websites (e.g. g2a) of games and software alike have popped up trying to profit from this arbitrage opportunity. You buy games in Russia and an American scoops up the license key for a little more, it’s all automated too nowadays.

On the same note, why are Levi’s jeans $100 bucks in Europe, but $40 in the USA? They’re probably coming out of the same Asian factory. Not an economist but different value propositions I guess.

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

#188

Post by Mistletoe »

alexandre_m wrote: post #174
decadancer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's a bad practice. I'm Russian and Steam games are (were) 1.5x-2x times cheaper for Russia compared to Europe and Americas, even before regional passes. I don't know whether that was responsiblity of devs or storefront, but it seemed quite a fair and profitable practice, because the price point you are willing to pay for a game (or an app) is different for people from different economical and cultur…

The economics of all of that seem sketchy to me. It sounds like the main North American market is subsidizing the apps being produced and sold worldwide. Does the same logic apply for other virtual good such as digital music elsewhere?

It applies to video games and software for sure. I think this is why it is almost always cheaper to buy a code online for something like a Microsoft product.

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

#189

Post by kccqzy »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #135
kneebonian wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Excel? Small and medium companies probably can run on Excel but I'm sure no large company can run their finance entirely with Excel. Google switched from Oracle to SAP. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/05/google-will-stop-using-oracl...
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