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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

#241

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?

The only app I've ever bought is Swiftkey. Now its Microsoft spyware. I don't even have a credit card on my apple ID (is that what its called now?)

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

#242
This shouldn't have to exist if it was designed properly from the start. This seems like backwards technology, something that is built on top of a legacy system and constrained by the design choices of that system. Perhaps that is why "upgrade" is in quotes.

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

#243
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 think that in general the third party articles you find soon after the press release will just be copy-pastes of the press release (no time for real analysis) with bits removed. So it depends on whether you're optimizing for more information (the PR) or less misreading skimreading/headline reading.

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

#244
post #157

Earlier 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.

They say .50 price steps are possible in the 10-50 range so X.90 + .50.

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

#245

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.

I don't think that's been true for over a decade. Google has a pretty sophisticated internal payments system that handles terms customers, invoicing, payment initiation, and lots more.

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

#246

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'm the same, except I also pay for two subscription-based apps that frequently update content, mostly for my kids. Simply Piano (amazing, can't praise it enough) and Tappity (mostly science-related content for younger kids, think Bill Nye or Beakman's World but semi-interactive and on an iPad instead of the TV—it's not amazing but my youngest really took to it and is getting enough out of it to justify the subscription, IMO)

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

#247
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…

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

#248

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…

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…

Thanks for that explanation. Is that why the price point ranges overlap - does the increment you select tell Apple how much they should round by when converting currency?

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 increments

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

#249
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…

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.

Context.

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

#250

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.

The guy who originally set up Apple’s SAP integration in the 80s(?) used to run Caffe Frascati, a popular café/music venue in downtown San Jose.
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