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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

#191

Post by zinekeller »

parker_mountain wrote: post #181
alexandre_m wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not really. The US medical system has this tendency to inflate pricing in a cat-and-mouse system where drug companies and insurance companies try to duke out what is the "correct" price of a drug. Setting it too high and the insurers won't cover it, too low and the pharmaceutical companies are "losing" profits to insurers. It's a terrible feedback loop that hampers those who can't afford insurance because the premiums are too high because pharmaceutical companies know that in most cases insurers will pay.

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

#192

Post by lzaaz »

decadancer wrote: post #124
BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for clarifying this. This is such an Apple thing to do. Frankly it doesn't matter what the exact price is. All economics are approximate.

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…

This is fair. OTOH, you have the single European market (the EU forces games, apps, hardware, etc to be sold at the same price everywhere in the EU in practical terms), which has shafted poor countries-it's disgraceful that a Swedish costumer pays the same price for an iPhone than a Portuguese costumer while making several times as much money every month.

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

#193

Post by CameronNemo »

chongli wrote: post #179
pasc1878 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EUR price includes VAT, 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,

We have the same thing in Canada. Taxes are not included in the price so that people can be aware of how much tax they're paying and adjust their behaviour accordingly. Since sales taxes are charged on some products but not others, the price-conscious consumer can elect to choose the tax-free products over the tax-burdened ones.

???

If taxes are included in price, the consumer can just look at the price and compare rather than jumping through the additional mental hoop to determine if one item is subject to sales tax, and what its price is in tgat case.

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

#194

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

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?

I'm an American. I routinely buy things in GBP, EUR, and JPY and the amounts convert to an arbitrary number in USD. So what? It is displayed to me as 9.99 EUR. I understand I'm not going to have a nice, pretty .99 at the end of my credit card transaction.

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

#195

Post by guelo »

seydor wrote: post #142
hackernewds wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they do it because they can against the desires of the entire global community of developers. the hallmarks of a true monopoly

Not a monopoly, at least not outside US. But a very capricious high end electronics brand

Depends how you define the market. They are 100% a monopoly for the iOS apps market.

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

#196

Post by CameronNemo »

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #184
richrichardsson wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes.

https://taxfoundation.org/vat-rates-europe-2019/

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

#197

Post by slg »

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 isn't really subsidizing because the goods are virtual which means the marginal costs are minimal. There of course could be infrastructure costs to get up and running in a new country. However once that is done, almost all the marginal revenue developers get out of these additional markets is profit because there is practically no cost to selling an extra copy even if it is at an extremely steep discount.

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

#198

Post by sokoloff »

r00fus wrote: post #186
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.

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 regulatio…

The only thing I’d rather work on less than SAP is rolling my own ERP system.

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

#199

Post by colejohnson66 »

hackernewds wrote: post #134
nomel wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google Maps is full of ads. They’re just not the kind you’re used to. The POI it decides to show is partially a money game.

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

#200

Post by sokoloff »

guelo wrote: post #195
seydor wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a monopoly, at least not outside US. But a very capricious high end electronics brand

Depends how you define the market. They are 100% a monopoly for the iOS apps market.

And Ferrari is a 100% monopoly supplier of Ferrari engines.
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