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

9to5mac.com

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

#91

Post by barumrho »

black_puppydog wrote: post #87
barumrho wrote: post #84

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...

This means that for foreign customers of yours, your product will have constantly fluctuating price. I personally don't find that desirable. Also, there is some considerations to be made for purchasing power especially for items like apps. $1 might be trivial in the US, but it may not be so in a third world country.

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

#92

Post by seydor »

black_puppydog wrote: post #66

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#93

Post by threeseed »

__ryan__ wrote: post #69
black_puppydog wrote: post #66

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…

Not even close. They semi-arbitrarily came up with prices they allow in the App Store, probably “justifying” it using some metrics, or your app will be rejected.

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 drove what they could and could not do.

Perhaps they've done an overhaul for this system or migrated to a custom built one which is what has enabled all of this new functionality.

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

#94

Post by seydor »

barumrho wrote: post #91
black_puppydog wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This means that for foreign customers of yours, your product will have constantly fluctuating price. I personally don't find that desirable. Also, there is some considerations to be made for purchasing power especially for items like apps. $1 might be trivial in the US, but it may not be so in a third world country.

that's quite desireable, i mean it's what everything else in the world does.

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

#95

Post by fckgw »

redtriumph wrote: post #7
cauthon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you too young to remember “I Am Rich“? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

"The application was removed from the App Store without explanation by Apple the day after its release, August 6, 2008" Would be interesting to know the thought process for doing this.

It generated support complaints and provided no value to the user.

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

#96

Post by nomel »

aeternum wrote: post #83
nickthegreek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to search for no subs. I dont want to see a result for a $5/week wallpaper app.

No subs and no ads would be great.

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".

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

#97

Post by JonathonW »

black_puppydog wrote: post #66

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 alternative would be to have developers manually specify prices for each region, which wouldn't really scale for a lot of developers (keeping track of exchange rates for 175 different regions is work). Or to do automatic currency conversion from {developer's native country here}, which would eliminate some of the manual work but lead to "ugly" prices in other regions (no x.00 or x.99 pricing), unless they had some rounding scheme to make them look nicer, and then you're almost back at the current price point scheme.

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

#98

Post by duxup »

timbre1234 wrote: post #38

Give me an option to search for "no ads" in an app, or give me nothing. I've simply stopped buying iOS apps because I'm done with the ad loads.

This might not be what you want but Apple Arcade has slowly become the place I search for games. Quality of games is very high.

No ads, no IAP. As a parent it is also handy for the same reasons as far as the kids devices go.

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

#99

Post by cactus2093 »

ryandrake wrote: post #44
nine_k wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The psychology is (allegedly) simple. When you see a price like $4.99, unless you're pre-conditioned, you are expected to read it as FOUR-99, essentially $4, even though it's $5 for all practical purposes. Often it is styled as $4.⁹⁹ to double down on this effect. This looks silly, and many people, including me, have taught themselves to recognize this pattern and round the price correctly without a mental effort. So…

How can it be that anyone in the world falls for this anymore? My daughter recognized this obvious pattern when she was 7 years old: "It's $5, dad, why don't they just say $5?" I wonder if pricing something at $4.99 have anything more than a vague subliminal effect these days?

Part of it is that people want to be tricked. If I want to buy something but I'm on the fence about whether it's worth $5 then I think the $4.99 price works as like a semi-subconscious plausible deniability mechanism to let me allow myself to buy it.

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

#100

Post by travem »

a_c wrote: post #19

Actually what the motivation in having price point ending in .99? Why can't I simply price my app at, for instance, 10? I understand there is a pricing psychology in play and I faintly remember it has something to do with accounting but I can't recall the specifics. Can anyone shed some insight?

In addition to the other replies (which I agree with) about the psychological aspects, another aspect historically is that avoiding round numbers meant that change had to be given when making a purchase.

I.e. if you bought something that cost $5 you could just hand the $5 to the cashier and they could just avoid ringing you up and pocket the money. In contrast if the object cost $4.99 or $4.95 say they would have to ring it up in the till so they could open it to provide change to the customer.

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