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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

#211
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's 15% for developers making less then $1m/year.

And as Apple demonstrated in Netherlands with the dating apps it is actually cheaper to use them that try to run your own payment system. Especially if you're trying to target a global audience.

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

#212

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?

Well, the economy of that is sketchy in that multinational corporations pay sometimes an order of magnitude less for the exact same job simply due to you living in a different country.

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

#213

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's really the opposite, it's a form of price discrimination.

There's a theory of surplus in economics, which is the extra benefit that someone gets from a transaction above what they would have been willing to pay.

If I buy a game that I would have paid $100 for for $50, then I have a "$50" consumer surplus. One the other end, if the producer was willing to let that game sell as low as $40, then they have a producer surplus.

Profit seeking producers want to capture as much as the surplus as they can, and they do this through price discrimination. You see this in product as two things that are essentially the same but with different marketing etc.,

Price discrimination based on geography is quite effective though as well. People with lower incomes aren't as willing to pay high prices for games. Countries can be effectively segmented based on geography (whether virtually or not), and through this producers can charge a higher price to countries with high incomes (taking away the consumer surplus they would have had vs a lower global optimal price), and still get some value out of consumers in lower income countries.

So it's not that NA is subsidizing the market, so much as it is the company trying to squeeze the most of everyone. Now, you could call it subsidizing in that there are probably products that wouldn't be brought to market without the NA market to pay for them, but that's not really "subsidizing".

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

#214

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 could also be said that the cost of compliance and the cost coming from the litigiousness of American consumers shouldn't be subsidized by countries where selling an app is monumentally easiest and cheaper.

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

#215

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.

But it is not just math. It is about what constitutes a cheap app for an East-European or to a Chinese person vs that of an American, and how that changes with time in relation to the currencies. I really don’t get this dismissive mindset, do you honestly believe that a trillion dollar company didn’t think of this one little trick that you figured out in a minute?

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason I'm aware of is for foreign customers who are buying in foreign currencies. As a developer, I don't want to set prices in every currency, so they translate the price grid for me which I found useful.

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...

How much do you think about spending 5 dollars? How much do someone who earn 10 times less than you think about that exact 5 dollars? Price categories absolutely make sense.

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

#217
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this was the wrong move. The original source is better in this case and you are letting your anti-corporate bias and personal opinion affect your decision making as a moderator. What makes this so awful to read to you?

3rd party sourcing isn't anti-corp. The purpose is to seek a more neutral position. Apple is clearly motivated to say positive things about Apple.

It has never been about seeking a neutral position. What is neutral about Vitalik shilling the Ethereum ecosystem?[0] He's clearly motivated to say positive things about it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878216

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

#218
post #165

We changed the URL from https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/12/apple-announces-bigge... to a third party article I just googled. If there's a better third-party article, we can change it again. 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…

I don't know the mechanics of this or if it would just be manual, but when there is aggregation of submitted links (which I would assume is the case for a story like this), it does seem like the main PR link should be the title URL, but could other links all just be collected in a single comment?

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.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's one of those things that's advocated by tax-haters and seems like it might do what they say it does, but in practice just makes life more annoying while doing nothing useful. See also: having to manually file taxes, no matter how simple.

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

#220
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only difference is that you can choose two kinds of evil for something required for everyday life, while you can live without a car or choose from several different ones. Owning the former platform is great power that shouldn’t be unilaterally controlled by a private company.
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