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?
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
#242Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points
#243We 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…
Do you want to cater to the most thorough commentators or the masses?
Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but lead to "ugly" prices in other regions Isn't this change an introduction of those ugly prices? If I'm reading the new rules correctly, Apple now supports prices like 7.39 or 37.40. I guess they don't end in a 1-4 or 6-8, but they aren't the cleanest numbers either. And if that last digit is really the problem, rounding to the nearest 5 is always a possibility.
7.39 should be possible as part of the 10c price step, but how would you get 37.40 out of the system? You could do 37.00, 37.90, 37.95, or 37.99 via the "X." ones, and the first category would all end in X9.
Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points
#245Earlier 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.
I understand that Cloud specifically is switching to manage accounting using SAP, but most of Google runs via our own in-house systems.
Source: work at Google in payments. This is only my personal opinion.
Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points
#246How 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 think it's $300-400 a year for the pair of them? Easy to justify especially in Simply Piano's case, when you consider what even a few weeks of in-person piano lessons would cost (not that it makes such lessons obsolete, but still).
But yeah, outright buying apps or using IAP... ProCreate, Angry Birds (yay! they re-released the original, which is one of the only two of those I care about, finally! Now if I could just get Seasons again...), several tables in Pinball Arcade bought when they were on steep discount just before they lost the licenses to most of the tables I was interested in. I think that's all my App Store purchases, ever, otherwise.
I think most of the money's from "whales" in shitty F2P games.
Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points
#247We 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…
Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points
#248So, 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…
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…
For example, on the surface it seems redundant to have overlapping prices bands
$0.29-$9.99 in $0.10 increments
$0.49-$49.99 in $0.50 increments
Since 10 cent increments include 50 cent increments, so why not say: $0.29-$9.99 in $0.10 increments
$9.99-$49.99 in $0.50 incrementsRe: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points
#249We 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…
What could a third party add to a primary-source's press release other than speculation? Sure in some cases there could be some "sources say..." or "when reached for comment Apple clarified that..." but in general I think its going to be a rehashing and speculation in general.
Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points
#250Earlier 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.