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 $7,43 for something, the ghost of Steve Jobs will start haunting you?
That's, like... I don't even know. Feels infantilizing to me. Or what am I missing?
Apple uses price points rather than having developers explicitly specify prices because they're currency-independent: you specify a price point and Apple chooses appropriate prices for each of the ~175 different storefronts where your app could be available. Apple then periodically adjusts the international prices as exchange rates fluctuate, to keep them in parity with the US prices at the same tiers.
The alternative would be to have developers manually specify prices for each region, which wouldn't really scale for a lot of developers (keeping track of exchange rates for 175 different regions is work). Or to do automatic currency conversion from {developer's native country here}, which would eliminate some of the manual work but lead to "ugly" prices in other regions (no x.00 or x.99 pricing), unless they had some rounding scheme to make them look nicer, and then you're almost back at the current price point scheme.
I don't think that's a bad practice. I'm Russian and Steam games are (were) 1.5x-2x times cheaper for Russia compared to Europe and Americas, even before regional passes. I don't know whether that was responsiblity of devs or storefront, but it seemed quite a fair and profitable practice, because the price point you are willing to pay for a game (or an app) is different for people from different economical and cultural backgrounds. You aren't getting a game for 80$ if your monthly salary is 300
From what I understand, the Russian market has a lot of tech-savvy users but disposable income is lower. If you didn’t price your app for the Russian market, it was more likely to get pirated or cloned. Similar caveats in certain parts of eastern Europe. At least, that was the justification I’ve heard.
Different story in places like Africa, where you often make a completely different app to contend with things like data caps and slow networks (e.g. Facebook Lite).
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.
> 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),
That's not true, where are you imagining this from? Hardware certainly doesn't cost the same, at the very least there are different VAT levels, but also pricing is adapted to the local market (literally just checked, i can get an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 for 300€ less in Bulgaria compared to France). Software I'm unsure how to check, but Netflix costs varies by county.
> i can get an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 for 300€ less in Bulgaria compared to France
This is insane. What prevents grey market arbitrage? Why wouldn't hardware from the country where hardware is cheapest immediately get posted on the local equivalent of eBay in the country where it is most expensive?
In any case I had no idea hardware margins were so squishy. For software, yes, profits are maximized by reducing unit prices where incomes are lower (since otherwise you won't sell any), but that's enabled by the fact that the marginal cost of unit production is very nearly zero and you're still making money even if you sell it for 25% of the rich-country price. That's obviously not the case for a laptop
> This is insane. What prevents grey market arbitrage? Why wouldn't hardware from the country where hardware is cheapest immediately get posted on the local equivalent of eBay in the country where it is most expensive?
Few things - mostly support and localisation support (e.g. the keyboard layout is different in iirc literally every European country, and most people want their local layout they know).
You can buy it directly from Bulgaria to save 300€ then. It would be illegal for the shop to tell you you have to pay more for buying from another country.
>Software I'm unsure how to check, but Netflix costs varies by county.
If it does (I don't think so, the minimal differences are because of VAT) you can subscribe from another European country (using a VPN or whatever) and Netflix can't ban you or block you from using it (like they would if you bought the subscription from a third world country for example)
Is it fair that both Finland and Italy pay 7.99€/month for the basic plan?
Netflix is kind of an exception to this because you're not buying the exact same service in each country, Show/Movie availability differs per country, but also some regional audio/subtitles availability differs per country (there's a language setting in your account settings but it doesn't have all the audio/subtitle languages netflix supports, even though the number of options has grown since last time I checked it...)
And thanks to another EU law if you subscribe to Netflix in one EU country, you get that country's Netflix Library everywhere in EU. So we can talk about "Swedish Netflix" and "Bulgarian Netflix" as two different services..
How can you fit that much misinformation into one comment? EU != Europe. Russia is not in the EU. Nor is it completely russian. Only a select number of countries in Europe is part of the EU.
And there is no such thing as consistent, EU-enforced pricing. Get out of here ...
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".
> People with lower incomes aren't as willing to pay high prices for games.
It's a bit deeper than that, let me share my perspective of purchasing software in a developing country.
Growing up I remember that video games only picked up in popularity when you could "buy" pirated games. For reference, I'm talking about the Nintendo Wii era and those were about 1-3 USD each for a CD with the pirated version of the game.
Also for reference, right now a Nintendo Switch game (that costs $60 MSRP in the US) sells for about $90 due to taxes and stuff [1].
To me, there's two significant issues with that:
1. People don't feel like they are stealing when buying pirated goods. They are spending their hard-earned cash into something they want/like, and that's as far as their reasoning goes. This happens for other software like Photoshop too, and even physical goods. I remember buying fake yu-gi-oh cards knowing they were fake, but that's the only ones that were available and that I could afford. I had a few legit ones and I treated them as a treasure, in the same way you treat your fancier clothes better than your normal ones.
2. You can have a full meal in a diner for about $3 in my country, desert and all. If you want to sell food, that's how low you have to go because that's what people can afford. A $10 dollar meal is normal in the US, but here it would be a luxury.
Now, that combination is very problematic as you can expect. People do want to pay for stuff, and to their minds that's what they are doing. To me, selling pirated goods is as scummy as it gets, but I cannot blame someone for buying it when it's their only choice.
So for most companies, having "regional" prices on this markets is the difference between selling or not.
Yes. That's because they aren't stealing. It's completely normal to feel like you're not stealing when you're not stealing.
The copyright monopolists would very much prefer that you felt bad when you "steal" their imaginary property but the truth is nobody other than the politicians they lobby cares about their opinion on anything.
Excellent. So how do we figure out which regions have the lowest prices so we can pretend to be in that region? Because I sure as hell don't want to pay high prices while some other guy is paying peanuts.
Any attempt at price discrimination should immediately result in arbitrage.
>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".
That's every product ever made for profit by a developer in a 1st world country. It's still essentially subsidizing even if you don't like the optics of the word.
Depending on the specifics of the business model (e.g. is the marginal good sold paying primarily for the up-front investment, or for the per-item costs), you can sometimes call it "NA subsidizing everyone else", or in other cases "vendor overcharging NA customers because they're wealthier on average", or in yet other cases, "selling at the local market rate".
It would be subsidizing if the effect were that Americans pay more so that people in other countries pay less.
But the alternative to Americans paying more isn't the other people having to pay more, the alternative is the product not existing. (or, alternatively, the company making less profit).
There might be some cases where if the US market didn't exist, the price in another country would go up, but it would happen because a company wasn't able to sustain a lower price with the reduced quantity, and would therefore have to settle for selling less quantity at a higher price.
From popular internet knowledge, games are more expensive in Australia then NA (Including digital distribution). Would you say that Australia is subsidizing games for Americans?
It is in the interests of North American consumers for the company to maximise it's revenue from other regions to help fund product development. Higher price points in developing countries would make the product largely unaffordable there, reducing revenue.
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.
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.
I think youre missing several inputs into your feedback loop. The original statement about the US system bearing the brunt of development stands. It's also true that insurers influence the market. Both are true. There are also government inputs into the market, political inputs a d supply chain elements that all feed into this. The one stakeholder will little real input in the end consumer who gets stuck paying whatever the others have decided they'll allow...
That doesn't explain the behavior of off-patent drugs being jacked up in price on a whim or near identical variants being made to extend patent protection and maintain the predatory pricing of the name brand. Their development costs are already recouped during the initial patent phase. Tweaking things a little doesn't cost them nearly as much.
Entire reseller websites (e.g. g2a) of games and software alike have popped up trying to profit from this arbitrage opportunity. You buy games in Russia and an American scoops up the license key for a little more, it’s all automated too nowadays.
On the same note, why are Levi’s jeans $100 bucks in Europe, but $40 in the USA? They’re probably coming out of the same Asian factory. Not an economist but different value propositions I guess.
Neither does Vietnam (one of the places Levi’s are produced nowadays) and the US, the pants are imported and duties are levied regardless of whether the pants are sold in Europe or the US.
I’m sure sales tax is less in pretty much every US state compared to European countries, but it still doesn’t explain a $60 difference in price. It’s largely different price points based on different locales in accordance with what consumers are willing to shell out for the product.
Something else to consider is motivating piracy. If they sell a piece of software for a flat price in all geos, the ones who can't afford it will invest more time in pirating the software. As a side effect, piracy is normalized in those communities as a necessary way of life in the digital world. Naturally, their tools and methods will leak out to other communities and make piracy easier in places that CAN afford them. Devs would rather sell to those communities at a "loss" than ostracize them and deal with the fallout.
Check out this brief description of how software proliferated in Poland during the early years of computers (3:09-8:27):
https://youtu.be/ffngZOB1U2A
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.
I think it applied to DVDs in the past and was impetus behind region locking media. Also another way to look at it is less subsidizing and more maximizing profit by not leaving money on the table in foreign countries.
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.
It applies to video games and software for sure. I think this is why it is almost always cheaper to buy a code online for something like a Microsoft product.
It kind of does, no? Would you want your recurring charge to fluctuate randomly just because the developer converts everything to their currency? Or what about getting screwed over and being charged an exorbitant price because you live in a poorer country and the developer wasn't considerate enough to add regional pricing based on your PPP?
You'd have to use a third party to remedy this but Apple handles it for you.
It's a decision that actually benefits the customer and developer enormously. Imo an "apple thing to do" is to change chargers simply to make a profit.
Apple handling price/international conversions and currency fluctuations seems immensely useful.
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.
Price points smooth the exchange rate fluctuation (how often should the prices be updated? Every second? More often?) and selects for prices that have certain cultural"gravity" as well.
I think buyers are more accustomed to and comfortable with "round" or "standard" prices like x.99, x.88, x.95, x.00 etc rather than x.47 or x.31.
It seems like every few minutes would be fast enough, but whatever. It's just weird that, given how important app store purchases are for Apple, they wouldn't just spend any amount of money to make the best possible system: do the currency conversion, snap to those behavioral psychology price points, round to the prettiest unit... the works. Wouldn't everything be on the table for the thing that makes so much money?
Heck, maybe they did do that, and this 900 price point system is actually the right way to do it. Doesn't seem like it, but maybe!
Exchange rate fluctuation I think could be handled perfectly fine without price points but the price point "gravities" is a really good reason to use the system. Not sure why it should limit developers to that system but it certainly makes the system attractive/useful for many.
> Not sure why it should limit developers to that system but it certainly makes the system attractive/useful for many.
Because most developers are presumably experts in programming* and whatever the domain of their app is* (game, drawing program, whatever) and not experts in the psychology of pricing (unless it's a pricing app I suppose!).
Now so what? They could allow you to pick a predetermined price or type whatever integer you want into it. But I assume they think consistency makes for a better buying experience, and poor pricing choices are a kind of externality that affects everyone.
I'm slightly dubious of this "externality" really being bad but in this case I'll give the horde of Apple marketing researchers the benefit of the doubt.
* This is HN so the obvious snark has not been inserted
The problem with appeal to authority on this is the same could have been said last week about why it wasn’t like this. It doesn’t make it any more reasonable it just explains it is the way it is.
Understood but my point was the list changed to add price points not that they had no list at all. Hard to argue the price points are the only ones that should be used because Apple is the best at marketing if Apple themselves are adding price points.
The other reasons for using the price point model are very convincing just not the appeal to Apple having a hoarse of marketing people.
It's also obvious that you don't want the price to fluctuate between 99 copper-pieces and 89 copper-pieces every day just because the USD/copper-piece rate is somewhere around where 95 copper-pieces is the converted price - you would want periodic manual adjustments to the prices for each price point, taking into account all kinds of marketing aspects, not some automatic immediate response to any change.
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?
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.
The point is that price points already are friendly-looking in every country. Price points are adjusted in each country, they’re not a 1:1 match with $USD.
Otoh, there's value in prices holding still for at least a while. And 'pretty' prices are appealing in general. You obviously can't hold prices still forever, but daily prices is probably not paletable.
The fact that is seems stupid from the point of view of the creator is irrelevant. It's not about the creators, it's about the users. Apple simplifies incredibly complex systems into good user experiences.
It is stupid. The exchange rates are a rehearing here. It's likely just a marketing aspect, setting the last digits etc or wlensrluring they don't lose out on a half cent of commission somewhere.
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
> developers manually specify prices for each region, which wouldn't really scale for a lot of developers
while this also is more aligned to Apple's goals, unless there's also a proven and generalized (geographically and at all price points, app types) observation where the price looking beautiful as 0.99 massively offsets the actual revenue gains of being 1.23.
> "ugly" prices in other regions (no x.00 or x.99 pricing), unless they had some rounding scheme to make them look nicer,
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.
Developers can go in 10c price steps from $0.29 to $9.99 (0.39, 0.49, 0.59, etc), or in 50c price steps from $0.49 to $49.99 (0.49, 0.99, 1.49, 1.99, etc), etc OR developers can use the 4 supported conventions for any price in those ranges, as long as you fit within the convention.
But you cannot start at a supported convention and then use the price steps.
Knowing apple, more likely scenario is that the systems are old and allowing such flexibility would be a Herculean task that needs a lot of investment with not a lot of upside.
No. The alternative would be a button "apply current exchange rates to all prices" and an additional input field where you can override this price per country. This is how Amazon does it for Kindle self-publishing.
The alternative would be to have developers set their price point and currency then allow Apple to still do the international conversion rates. There is zero benefit in these conversions to only having preset price points.
Your answer may be factually true but it is logically flawed.
Unless there is some marketing value here I suspect it has more to do with making sure they don't lose a half cent of commission rather than benefiting anyone else in any real way.
Apple did its best to reduce the pain points. Sometimes by adding more like butterfly if they goes off course. But it is all about user or developer experience. Just not always on it. Intent is different from result.
This blows my mind, I never thought about that. I imagine automatic currency conversion would make it especially hard for any company outside US/EU. They'd stick out like a sore thumb with their weird prices.
Since you seem to know a bit can you set which countries/regions have access say something like "only north america and Africa" ? Not an apple dev so I don't have a clue.
Yes. You can include or exclude regions and individual countries.
Another interesting thing: Apple’s price tiers are anchored to the US dollar. Even though I am a German developer, selling only to German speaking people in the EU, I have to adjust my price tier if the USD/EUR exchange rate is changed by Apple. They check for this roughly once per quarter.
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.
Yes, they can have a set of rules to set the prices. But then it’s not that different from the current system, which really is not problematic in the first place. I know this is the place for pedantic nit picking, but the fact that prices have some granularity is very much a non-issue.
In any case, actually probably have such rules, just not public. I am sure they have sales people being paid full time to agonise over such issues.
Apple obviously uses some conversation rate internally when creating and updating these pre-defined tables. They could use those same numbers, with the same update frequency, with an arbitrary input price.
I never buy anything in dollars on eBay. Sterling, sometimes, but it’s euros 99% of the time.
Prices on eBay actually look like something a human would choose. On AliExpress on the other hand the prices are all over the place, with really odd numbers of cents, which I assume comes from automatic conversion from whatever currency they initially priced it in (not necessarily dollars at that point).
The whole point is that it is not a multiplication with a conversion rate, it's a mapping that is not purely multiplicative, which has coefficients that in some regions may be significantly different than the exchange rate, that provides round numbers and stickiness to them, and avoids temporal fluctuations - prices in regional markets get adjusted when the ratio gets too far off, not with every change in excahnge rate, in order to reduce the frequency of price change.
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.
But they don't fairly translate the price. They just make up numbers for different currencies. $49.99 translates by Apple's standards to 59.99 EUR - which is roughly 10 Euros too much.
Interesting thing is that there is no way (that I could find) to buy apps in AppStore for my VAT registered company in a way that I could receive invoice with company details and all necessities to be able to get VAT refund.
They seem to pretend they are always selling to private persons and this is not necessary, yet there are many business apps and I am quite sure for business app VAT on 10,000 Eur app would hurt.
When selling a product, we were doing A/B tests with price points and so we had results that the same product was selling better if it was priced at £7.49 per month rather than £6.99. For some reason people subconsciously think that 7.49 is smaller than 6.99 or things like £5 wouldn't sell much but £5.99 would be going off the virtual shelves in an instant.
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.
Idk, doesn't this happen everywhere? Like at any physical store most things are $X.99 or $X.00 or $X.49, but not usually something like $X.31. Maybe this is just a US quirk.
Apple sees themselves as a storefront not a payment processor, so maybe the idea is to make things look more consistent as you're scrolling through or comparing multiple apps.
> A developer can't just set a price for something?
This description may help:
>Developers can set a base price for a storefront and currency they know well, and they will see autogenerated suggestions for prices for other regions and currencies—which they can either accept or replace with their own chosen prices.
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.
> 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 regulations (tax/hr legal) that is other companies bread & butter so it's worth "paying their price" rather than getting it wrong and being on the wrong side of litigation/legislation.
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.
Thanks for the story! When app and itunes stores first went live I remember getting these odd invoices at times and speculating with work friends about stuff like this!
OH YEAH, APPLE IS PROBABLY USING SAP ON THE BACKEND!!!!!!
I find a smaller number of price values better as a consumer, so a plausible (but much less uncharitable) interpretation could be that Apple does this because consumers prefer it.
They are running a store here. Maintaining order helps everyone. given the popularity of App Store, there will invariably be some that are inclined to price their apps at 420.69 or 42.24 or what not and avoiding that and making the prices show some consistency does help the store.
Why waste 4 bytes on a float when a 10 bit enum does the trick? With the cushy 1024 possibilities, they even have some room for expansion from the current 900 values.
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.
There was an article here yesterday about how new apartment buildings have only electronic locks that require either an iPhone or an Android to get into the apartment. I’m sure they’re not introducing those at a retirement home any time soon, but it’s increasingly becoming a requirement for daily life.
I’m not an App Store seller so I have no idea what this means. You can’t just pick any number that you want to sell your app for? You have predetermined prices set by Apple?
As I mentioned above pretty sure this was a limitation of their SAP based system and the way it was integrated with the iTunes Store (what App Store used) that required you to pre-define price points.
It works in tiers. You can set the price point to be tier 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on, with tier 1 being $0.99, or whatever the lowest price point is in all the other countries that the AppStore is in
Will this solve the issue that the $49.99 tier equals to a 59.99 EUR price? I get a ton of messages every week by would-be Euro customers complaining why the fuck I am fleecing them with a 59.99 EUR price when the US price is $49.99 and the exchange rate is currently roughly 1:1.
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,
There’s a reason for that: we don’t have VAT like you do.
Here’s an example: a base model iPhone 14 is $799. If I go to the Downtown San Francisco Apple Store, it is $868.12; if I go across a bridge to the Berkeley Apple Store it is $880.90; if I go from there across a different bridge to Corte Madera it is $870.91; if I go back through San Francisco down to the neighboring county to the Hillsdale Apple Store it is $875.90; and if I buy it in Cupertino, then it is $871.91. If I cross the State border with Oregon and go to an Apple Store in Tigard or Portland, then it is $799.
Which is the price Apple should be showing on the Apple Store? They tell you at checkout because what you pay at the end is calculated according to your shipping address, and it’s a line item: sales tax, but pricing is also marketing. Which price should Apple be quoting their American customers in national ad campaigns?
European states have different VAT rates too. A company advertises 999€ and then depending on the state it can be either 832,5€ + 166,5€ VAT or 839,5€ + 159,5€ VAT or 799,2€ + 199,8€ VAT etc.
In the case of Apple they sometimes do this and other times not. So for example the iPhone 14 is 999€ in both Germany and Austria, even though they have 19% vs 20% VAT rates. However in Finland which has a 24% rate the iPhone 14 is 1039€.
And does Apple have one Apple Online Store and App Store for the Eurozone or do they have separate Online and App Stores for each EU member they operate in in the local languages and currencies (for the EU and Eurozone are not even perfectly aligned)?
Almost every example I gave was within one State: California, except for the two I tacked on at the end from California’s nearest northern neighbor in Oregon. All of the California examples were within the same metro area (the San Francisco Bay Area) but different counties. There is one US website, and one US App Store.
It is not the same situation, only seemingly superficially similar until further inspection.
Local municipality taxes exist in Europe too. Some cities have an extra 1% tax for example and Apple isn't exempt from that. The price still remains what they advertise for the larger region.
The US does not have a national sales tax or VAT. Every state has their own tax, and some don't even have one.
Even within a state, sales taxes can vary at the county and municipality level.
To tell an American the full price plus tax they will pay for something, you need to know where they live. For expensive items like computers and phones, the price could vary by tens or hundreds of dollars.
Consumers, who don't have to know the ins and outs of local tax policies and exemptions to understand what the product they want to buy will cost them.
... which is used in plenty of places in Europe, yes? And not every place in the US uses FPTP. In fact, every election seems to add another locality to the list that use an alternative.
To be fair, Americans (and anyone else) are right to resent sales taxes. And I’m saying that as an American who’s far to the left of what some call “socialism” in Europe. Sales taxes are highly regressive, disproportionately impacting those least able to afford them.
It's not really sensible to look at the regressivity of a tax in isolation.
On the tax side, there are other factors you might want to optimize, like how distortionary the tax is and how effective it is at raising revenue.
On the spending side, a regressive tax + a progressive government redistribution policy can end up being progressive overall. For example, any tax can be made to be as progressive as you want by redistributing some of the revenue as a UBI.
Sales taxes/VATs are very effective at raising revenue and are less distortionary than most of the alternatives. This makes them good for funding redistributive policies. They won't tax billionaires out of existence, but they're a good tool for states to have in their toolbox.
Depends on the location. Sales taxes are determined at the state, county and municipal level and apply to different things in different places (so, for example, Illinois does not charge sales tax on magazines, but California does, and the tax rate on a single donut may be higher than the tax rate on a dozen donuts (prepared food vs groceries).
> the tax rate on a single donut may be higher than the tax rate on a dozen donuts
It’s even worse than that, which I learned unfortunately at a former employer. Two identically priced dresses could have different tax rates based on the formality of one vs the other, ie one being a simple LBD and the other being a sequined evening gown.
Does that apply to sales tax or import duties though? I’m not aware of any jurisdiction which has different sales tax rates for different types of clothing. Import duties are a whole other can of worms (in some cases, products are partially disassembled before crossing the border to lower the import duties and then reassembled after import).
> I’m not aware of any jurisdiction which has different sales tax rates for different types of clothing
I’ll have to ask someone as I’ve forgotten the specific jurisdiction, but yes, it was sales tax specifically. If memory serves, it was either a county or municipality sales tax I thought in one of the states of the United States, but I’ll see if I can confirm.
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.
It's not about the consumer. The price is listed before tax to manipulate you into feeling like it's cheaper. If they add tax while you check out, you're basically already committed to purchasing the product.
If you have two items and sales taxes are included in the price of one but not the other, the only way you can know which one has the taxes on it is to go look at some government website that lists all of the categories the tax applies to and those it does not.
On the other hand, if the taxes are not included in prices then you will see which one has taxes at checkout and elect not to purchase the item with taxes, preferring the item without taxes.
Furthermore, with taxes included in prices you are more susceptible to unscrupulous vendors charging taxes that should not be applied and pocketing the extra margins. One example of that is with the manufacturer of Niche coffee grinders charging VAT to international customers and pocketing the extra margin.
> On the other hand, if the taxes are not included in prices then you will see which one has taxes at checkout and elect not to purchase the item with taxes, preferring the item without taxes.
Why would you care? Having taxes included in sticker prices doesn’t change how much it costs you, only what percentage goes to your government. The only situation where not including taxes is potentially useful is when you explicitly don’t want to pay taxes, but you’re still happy to pay a higher price, if it means less money to the government.
Also in Europe we have a very simple solution to this problem. Every price tag has two numbers. The number in big font includes taxes, the little number underneath is without taxes. If you’re desperate to avoid giving cash to the government, then you just need to find items with the smallest delta between the two numbers. Retailers are also obliged to display both numbers, and provide a tax breakdown on your receipt, so you penny pinch your taxes to your hearts content.
> the only way you can know which one has the taxes on it is to go look at some government website
In Europe the tax is listed separately on the bill by law, no need to visit any website.
The amount of tax charged isn't hidden in Europe, it's just that the most prominent number is the total sum. The pre-tax part and all the taxes are also available separately for your information.
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.
One thing that can be problematic with App sales is that apps will usually have new purchases dry up after a while. But unlike old desktop software where you could release, fix bugs for a while, and then just call done, for mobile apps you need periodically update them, or risk getting unlisted from the stores. Some developers may be ok with that, but others would prefer their older apps to remain available. Those developers now have ongoing maintenance costs, so how can they recover that money?
The old desktop approach of new major versions that people have to purchase periodically is not really feasible on IOS, since old versions would clog up the app store, and there is no way to offer the new versions at a discount to past purchasers, which desktop software likes to do to avoid annoying recent customers when a new version comes out.
So to recover for costs from ongoing development, an app developer will either need to 1) somehow increase the number of people who will purchase the app, 2) add a recurring revenue source like ads to the app (possibly with IAP to disable), 3) make the app subscription based (but only some types of apps can pull this off), or 4) make the app IAP based, and when updating add new features that can be purchased.
Now not every app does any of those. Some will just a single unlock IAP with limited functionality before that. But this is not all that different from the old demo or shareware approach, and the design of the app store makes it generally better to have the demo and full version be the same app, at which point IAP is the way to do that. Without a recurring revenue source though, such apps are likely to either change approach or get abandoned eventually once the costs of periodically upgrading the app exceed the remaining revenue coming in.
----
Also there is the abusive IAP single use item to bypass artificial cooldowns MTX garbage that mobile games tend to be full of, but I really cannot bring myself to accept that as a legitimate business model. Even the Gacha model (terrible as it is) feels somewhat more legitimate, but I have plenty of significant concerns about those too. But I'm really looking at this from the perspective of non-games, or at least not "F2P" games.
Probably some. I think this change has more to do with emerging markets where users expect to make very small payments (and receive smaller benefits) than western users are accustomed too.
I think the free-to-play model has been destructive for many apps and games.
The rush to the bottom with $1 price tier, introduced by Apple, was also destructive in itself.
The App Store is a huge market, fortunes have been built, but I know many indie developers who have been reluctant to adopt the F2P model.
So I have no issue with subscribing to many apps I love to fund development, or maybe paying an extra “tip” through IAP. Or just IAP for more content.
But IAP and subscriptions enabled a few models I hate.
Free game (either with ads, IAP, or both) have flooded the App Store and destroyed the market for quality games. Even the better made ones (like Candy Crush) are still designed to wring money out of people.
On the subscription front there are so many scam apps. Buy a calculator app, and pay $5/week for it because they trick people into it.
I’d be happy with no consumable IAPs in games. Or just no IAPs in games at all. And Apple should probably review high subscription prices to find scams. Realistically is there any reason for weekly subscriptions? Maybe just monthly/yearly only.
> Even the better made ones (like Candy Crush) are still designed to wring money out of people
Arcade games may have been designed to deprive players of their quarters/tokens, but they have nothing on modern optimized monetization schemes, including many which bring mobile games much closer to slot machines, in the hope that gambling addict "whale" players will spend the sort of money that they might lose at a casino rather than a Chuck E. Cheese.
So many games that I might otherwise enjoy playing in are simply not fun for me because of the intrusive monetization schemes. F2P games add this annoying metagame of "fight against the obnoxious monetization traps" which I usually don't enjoy.
Bad monetization schemes set up an ugly conflict between developers and players that degrades the gaming experience.
It might be if they had better filters. IAP being used to effectively turn a demo into a full, paid version is one thing. Or IAP for some limited number of expansions in a game. IAP being used for "consumables" or to nickel-and-dime every feature is something else. But it's hard to distinguish between the two uses when browsing the store—and that's a big part of the reason I hardly game at all on iOS, browsing their games to sort wheat from chaff is too much of a chore and their games section in particular is a horrible mess because IAP exists and their filtering options suck. Problem goes away if the apps are simply paid or free, no IAP. Or if they'd create more categories for various uses of IAP, and let you filter by them.
Definitely not better for users. You used to buy an app and get everything it has to offer. You wouldn't have to worry about getting a useless app and having to pay another $1,000 to get it functional. And you'd know that any reviews of the app are inclusive of functionality you'll have access to.
With IAP, it's really difficult to know what you're getting and how much it will cost you in the end. And reviews may be discussing a completely different app experience. Plus the constant feeling that you're being nickel and dimed.
It's the developer's choice, just like family sharing for the original purchase. This was a good move, since so many apps went from paid to free demo +IAP to unlock. I think a lot of devs who previously allowed family sharing for paid apps have turned family sharing on for IAP.
Let’s not pretend that the App Store is full of Indy “makers”. It came out in the Epic trial that 85% of App Store revenue came from slimy pay to win games and loot boxes.
I don't dislike some DLC purchases like new levels etc.. I'm happy to pay for major expansions to games as well.
But I have little interest in games that rely on scammy paid gacha/loot boxes/slot machine mechanics, monetized play-and-wait/energy systems, paid in game currencies, progress paywalls, etc. - not to mention intrusive advertising for monetization schemes. I'm not entirely huge on paid cosmetic options either.
> Then again, at this point, Apple is a treasury operation that also sells phones and computers.
I'm guessing you are joking but incase you were not, Apple still makes far far more from selling new products than they do from investments. So that statement is false or misleading.
By investments do you mean App Store commissions? They do make quite a lot from that. Not more than they make on hardware sales, but it's a pretty substantial fraction of their revenue.
When you RTFA, you'll learn that Apple is also making it far simpler to manage their app pricing in 45 currencies/175 storefronts. For example:
"Starting today, developers of subscription apps will also be able to manage currency and taxes across storefronts more effortlessly by choosing a local storefront they know best as the basis for automatically generating prices across the other 174 storefronts and 44 currencies. Developers will still be able to define prices per storefront if they wish. The pricing capability by storefront will expand to all other apps in spring 2023."
Additional capabilities are noted in the announcement.
I’m confused because this is how it already worked. Unlike regular purchases, subscription pricing was always managed by choosing a price in one territory, letting it recommend prices for all the other territories (based on the exchange rate at that date) and giving you the option to make final adjustments. The prices never adjust for exchange rates afterwards unless you re-run the process manually. This was required because fluctuating prices are bad for subscriptions as customers get locked in.
So I don’t understand what’s different here, other than expanding this feature to all apps in the future.
Still no easy way for app developers to handle upgrades. Apple really wants to push apps towards profitable but exploitative subscription pricing models.
And selling to business customers who don't have the huge IT dept. to setup a full Apple Business Account is a nightmare! Most employees use their own iPhones, and Apple specifically closed the Volume Purchase Program.
The VPP was a way for a small company to basically purchase download codes and distribute as needed.
One man IT department here: eh? While the 1st time set up was a bit silly, involving digging up a duns number and having our CTO call for some reason, after that it was pretty smooth sailing. SimpleMDM handles the device onboarding, assigning software licenses basically boils down to purchasing them in the Apple business portal and then handing them out through MDM.
Apple loves design and beauty. Crisp numbers and stability are more user friendly and aesthetic. Also some numbers have implications in certain markets. Seeing numbers like or $69.42 or $444 or $7.23 is just bad all around.
International price conversion while maintaining those is also challenging.
Before attacking Apple policies, it's worth considering why their extremely deep design process might have led to that choice.
There's a reason most retail stores use price points and not random numbers.
Pricing like this:
$7.23
$5.48
$9.21
is just ugly and feels cheap. It's the same reason they have UX standards generally.
Why does anyone care about 1 cent on a $5 purchase? Does anyone here care? The new price points seem to provide enough flexibility with less disadvantage.
From a business perspective, if I had to guess the increased cognitive load would decrease shopping time and increase decision fatigue. I'd also guess that the retail industry has studied this endlessly, and that Apple is basing their pattern partially on this.
This also decreases opportunities for useless psychological price competition and focuses people on quality. Do I want the $1.82 product or the $1.93 product? You probably want the BETTER product.
I think you're probably better off having your prices at $0.99, $2.99, and $5.99 rather than $0.84, $2.72, $5.63, even tho the latter is cheaper, particularly if you are in a large store that has thousands of prices.
Would it be reasonable to assume that the price points help them and not the buyer or seller? Decision fatigue matters more to me than which product you actually pick if I’m taking a clip of the sale regardless
This seems like a smart move from Apple to continue expanding into international markets and increasing revenue potential from their subscription models.
Offering a wider range of price points will allow developers to better tailor their pricing to different markets, and it will also give consumers more flexibility when choosing which apps to pay for.
It'll be interesting to see how this change affects the App Store ecosystem in the coming months, and whether it leads to more satisfied users or possibly more predatory subscriptions. The increased flexibility in pricing could be a great benefit for developers and consumers, but I'm going to keep an eye on how it impacts the meta of the pricing models.
EDIT: Not sure why this was flagged/replied to as GPT - I wrote this.
In retrospect I could have not summarized parts of the post, since ideally we've all read from the source information. Live and learn.
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.
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.
Some people, of course, fall for it; I suppose younger kids are heavily affected.
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.
Imagine two apps you’re scrolling by in the App Store. One is $5, the other is $4.99. Barely going attention (essentially picking subconsciously rather than consciously), you choose one to click first. What are the odds you clicked the $4.99 one?
I am old enough that when I was a kid in the UK there was still such a thing as a halfpenny (pronounced: ha'penny). Although please note: I am not that old; this was ½p - half a 'new penny', i.e. 1/200 of a pound sterling, and not to be confused with the old ½d, half of an old penny, which was 1/480 of a pound (or two farthings). Predecimal currency was well before my time. By over half a decade, in fact. But anyway, point is: of course this meant that some things were priced to end with £0.99½p. The rules are universal.
Just to add a data point about the pronunciation; the way you've written it leads me to read it as "har-penny", which I imagine is valid, however we pronounced it in my family as "hay-penny".
French stations too, they’ve introduced the 1.779€ a liter pricing a dozen years ago, so, 4 significant numbers. On a 100€ refill, it’s 10 cents, ie a drop.
Do you still have to pay $100 every year for the privilege of simply releasing an app?
I took one look at that and thought "fuck this". If you're a hobbyist with zero interest in making money off your apps, then you get a giant middle finger from Apple.
It really is a great offering, especially when rolled into a family plan. Lots of high quality games on apple TV as well. Only problem is the OS limitation so I can't use a lot of older iPads I have lying around.
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".
No reason not to give the end use the flags for searching. You either get results or you don't. If someone wants to make a simple calculator and not charge for it, they should be allowed to do so and ideally apple will give the tools to the user to find such an app.
Also, devs still do put ads in some purchasable apps So just having a "one time purchase" toggle doesnt solve the problem.
I don't mind IAP necessarily, but it's frustrating when you download an app and then it immediately says you have to pay $10 a month to even open it. Those shouldn't be listed as "free" in the App Store and should be separate from an app that might be "free" but have a minor feature disabled by an IAP.
If the in-app purchase to remove ads is shareable across the family, then that’s fine. If not, I’d prefer to just buy the app and have it share across my kids iPads instead.
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 to read that I increasingly think we need to make them an exception.
All the more so because they have a strong incentive to bury the lede (I mean in general—not saying that about this announcement), and while third-party sites have other crap incentives, like sensationalism and clickbait, they at least don't do that.
Looking at the original press release, I much prefer it to this third-party site. All the third-party site really did was remove a tiny bit of fluff, but it's having intermittent loading issues and is absolutely covered in ads if you aren't using an ad blocker. It also removes some of the actual content!
I mean, basically the web sucks right now. Classic rant incoming: There's definitely a need that sits between boring PR release and ad-filled regurgitation. You can't tell me that heaps of ads are actually helping the monetization of content, we're on the other side of the slippery slope. Thank goodness for adblock, I guess.
I would always prefer ad-free information directly from the source, and to follow HN guidelines without leaving them open to interpretation (call me an HN fundamentalist I guess).
Corporate press releases are never ad-free—the ads are just inlined. Worse, they're written in a demoralizing bureaucratic antilanguage that makes me, at least, want to bite my head off.
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?
Anti-corporate bias is a pretty good bias for the editor of HN to be accusable of. It's a lot more common to hear the opposite and I know which one I prefer (and makes my life easier).
I don't mean to be flippant—you're right that personal opinion is affecting my judgment. I plead that (1) this is inevitable; (2) I do my best to make calls that are good for the community as a whole; and (3) there are vastly more times when I squash my personal preference in favor of #2.
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.
I see your reasoning but I disagree. HN articles don’t need to be unbiased. The reason being, if you want a more neutral take, just take a look at the HN comments.
HN submissions are usually primary sources, and the HN comments are where you have the discussion. Sometimes even the top voted comment is just a summary of the actual submission, but rephrased to be less biased or more clear. If HN can’t point out the buried lede or explanation and get it upvoted then there’s a larger problem, but in practice I don’t find this to be the case (though maybe I’m wrong).
Does the article provide anything which the HN comment section wouldn’t?
For sure HN articles don't need to be unbiased, but corporate press releases are particularly soggy and misleading. I'm sure there are exceptions but boy are they rare, especially as company size grows.
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.
Very often the PR is designed to bury the lede. Third party sources typically highlight whatever is in the company's interest to bury.
I'm not saying that was the case here, because I didn't read the articles. However, the pattern is so close to universal that it wouldn't be surprising.
Added context by 3rd parties has a strong tendency to either add more fluff or replace the biases of the company with the biases of the particular article not just clarify. One benefit of reading the direct press release is you at least have a clear understanding going into it that the company is going to be biased towards itself. Couple that with having every bit of new information released unfiltered and it's why I prefer starting with the press release then building context instead of trying to get both at once.
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?
That is true, and it definitely makes the solution suboptimal. I mean here I am defending the sort of websites that in HN's context mostly count as crap. That's bound to have downsides. The defense is extremely targeted to this one scenario though.
The site you picked ironically is failing to load for me on Safari in iOS, likely because I have an ad blocker enabled. It just keeps going into a reload loop.
I would second everyone else’s sentiment that going with the official PR statement is better , especially because Apple are really good about fast loading pages without ads, and none of these other sites provide new information that’s not in the press release.
Additionally many of the third party sites are really bad for accessibility, whereas the official Apple one is excellent for those who need readers.
Newsroom post is just better, I don't understand the need for this.
Are you going to verify that the alternative article is accurate and doesn't interpret the official information in a bad way (I mean in general--not saying that about this announcement)?
I agree, especially when original source is completely lacking in context. So basically I think the better article should be submitted.
But in this case I think Appleworld is a poor choice. 9to5[1] are generally much better. Avoid Macrumors and Appleinsider unless it is absolute necessary.
The article you linked is mostly just a copy+paste of the apple page, with a few paragraphs removed.
I personally don't think going from the direct news source -> random news source you just googled that copy+pasted most of it anyway is worth doing.
> but corporate press releases are so awful to read that I increasingly think we need to make them an exception.
Is it really that much better if they just removed 2~3 paragraphs? They added nothing of value other then trackers and ads.
I do ask seriously - does removing 2~3 paragraphs really make it that much better?
Are we really going to move to having one person (no offense) to arbitrarily change the URLs from the official news source to a random one from your google search results?
tl;dr - doing this removes the benefits of first hand reporting, has effectively no different content, and you appeared to have randomly selected one that offers no clear benefit in it's content.
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.
Maybe the policy should be that whichever page is chosen should at least link back to the main PR source, so you're only one step away from getting there.
In this case the page links the PR prominently in the first line of copy, so that seems OK.
The value is there. People buy useless shit all of time to show off their wealth. Is there any difference between having a $10,000 app or having a $100+ cosmetic skin in a game?
Early on, I remember there being a tactic for apps where the owner wants them to be findable in the App Store, but doesn't want any new buyers, they set the price to $10K. But these days, I think the most expensive apps are $1K - app.cash, vueCAD Pro and Cyber Tuner.
I would imagine any medical app/ERP/etc. would have creative ways to get users to not make a one-time purchase via the App Store. Although certain interpretations of the rules might mean they have to offer App Store signup as an option.
It looks like this isn't just iOS and iPadOS, but also macOS. In that case, there is plenty of software that fits that bill, such as Maya and Avid. I'm sure there's mass media, banking, video game development, and lots of other software that costs near that, or will some time in the future.
Even if it were just for iOS and iPadOS though, they do want iPad Pro to compete with desktops in places where expensive software runs. For instance, Grass Valley Livetouch could be done on an iPad.
Maybe not the app itself, but I could see for example, a business wants to purchase $10K worth of advertising on a platform through the their ad channel app.
It would seem crazy for an ad agency to implement that through an IAP where Apple takes $3k off the top (I assume that 30% rate still applies here?) when you're dealing with high-paying clients that could be told "go to our website to purchase"
Eh, not really. The benefit of in-app purchases is you can make a button that users can press that's probably already hooked up to their credit card so they can make purchases without the ask of getting them to type in their credit card number, which is a more conscious action that gives them plenty of time to think about whether or not they /really/ want to make that purchase. Amazon's one-click checkout, ShopPay, etc are not just for user convenience!
Comparatively, a high-profile client spending tens of thousands of dollars in ads isn't doing so on impulse, they're doing it cause it's their job. They'll open up a browser and punch in some banking details if it's the only way to get those ads out.
I believe you can buy it through the app but it’s not an IAP. it gets charged to your card associated with your Tesla account. Otherwise Apple would get their 30% and that’s not worth it to Tesla.
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?
This is why I find it so baffling that there are so many devs/companies chasing the golden ring of app revenue with sincerity when clearly is a very warped marketplace. What types of useful, non-scam apps do people look for and buy that lead devs to believe there's some opportunity? Why create it as an app and deal with all that BS when you could just make a nice web site/PWA?
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.
I spent ~150€ since 2018, mostly for productive apps.
Canarymail (A mail client which supports SMTP streaming + PGP) - I think was about 30€ lifetime.
StrongBox Pro (A Keepass 2 client) - 80€ Lifetime
ProCreate - 10€ Lifetime
Affinity Designer 1 - 12€ lifetime
FEZ - 5€ Lifetime (Game)
TweetBot - 5€ Lifetime but now abandoned for Subscription Software. Doesn't work anymore, I'm using the normal Twitter App now (became usable over the last few years). The only app where I was disappointed in doing a lifetime purchase. It was abandoned really quickly after my purchgase.
Blitzer Pro - 10€ Lifetime
Threema - 4€ Lifetime
DWD WarnWetter - 2€ Lifetime. Most accurate weather app for Germany
Facetune 1 - 4€ (Didn't fix my face! Surpise!)
Reeder - 5€ RSS Feed App, I use this together with Miniflux Server
My last purchase was in 2021, Reeder. I made most purchases when I got the devices, and all lifetime over SaaS purchases have paid for themselves by now. :)
They say they support up to $10,000 in one part but then in the chart the $100 increment only goes up to $9,999.99, so which is it? $9,999.99 or $10,000?
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.
“Our metrics show that less than 0.02% of all apps are using the $26.65 and $57.30 price points. They are therefore no longer available to new apps. Existing apps using these price points will be required to change to one of the other supported price points by March 1, 2024.”
I don't agree with most of what Musk does; but if this is the kind of innovation that requires a team of highly compensated tech employees and warrants a press release; something is actually, seriously wrong with efficiency in companies like Apple, and maybe he's actually right that Twitter, or many companies, could run better on far fewer employees.
EU and US has already told Musk that his content moderation, trust/safety, compliance teams are woefully inadequate and would need to be significantly increased to comply with existing decrees and regulations.
Also whilst some employees may find it fun and others on H1B have no choice but working 80+ hours is not sustainable.
So before making conclusions about whether Twitter is some innovative new approach to headcount I would give it a little more time.
Since when does the US have regulations about content moderation?
> significantly increased to comply with existing decrees and regulations.
What decrees and regulations? If the US wanted stuff to be illegal, make it illegal. You seem to be implying that Twitter should be a substitute government.
Twitter has an agreement with the FTC around their data security practices. EU has GDPR now and DSA in 2024.
And EU member states eg. Germany have their own rules for what content is allowed or not.
You can argue whether the laws are appropriate or not but Twitter does have to comply with them or stop making their product available in those jurisdictions.
Not to mention, everything works smoothly (as per design) during a _code freeze_. Luckily Twitter has few competitors, and also the ones that remain also have code freeze during this time.
When software and systems become sufficiently large, change becomes extremely difficult. Even strong architectures have their limit. I have to imagine that Apple has hit that limit serving payments worldwide.
The real lie isn't that this was a difficult and costly change for their top-notch team. The real lie is that this works at all - some dev out there is waiting with no fingernails left for the bugs to start pouring in.
Absolutely; but I think this new "feature" is the most pure crystallization I've ever seen of the inefficiency inherent to big tech.
Most people who read this press release would probably respond: Woah, that's how pricing on the app store works? Devs can't just set whatever price they want? The natural and totally reasonable followup question should be: Why? There are: reasons! There aren't no legitimate reasons why it is how it is (exchange rates is probably the most legitimate one). But the most significant illegitimate reason why is undeniably: momentum. This is how the system works; this is how the people proximate to the system, internally and externally, understand it to work. We linearly extrapolate how the system works today, to how we want it to work; fill in the gaps on the number line.
That extrapolation is genuinely where the inefficiency bloat of big tech comes from. Kyla Scanlon recently did a great economics-focused summary of big tech's "predator problem", born from decades of extremely low interest rates [1], which I think covers the situation really well. Apple & the App Store haven't had a predator. There has been no pressure for them to become more efficient; to rethink the platform from fundamentals; so you end up with teams whose task was to linearly extrapolate the wrong thing. It probably took many people; a long time; and there are almost definitely extremely smart on-call engineers right now biting their fingernails hoping it works. Its entirely the wrong thing; but it was the easier thing over alternatives without the natural pressure of a predator to add weight to the right thing.
When software & systems become sufficiently large, changes become difficult. Predators prey on an inability to change, but big tech hasn't had a predator to do this.
That's my point; that clearly they have so many people and so few actual problems to solve that they're worried about adding more discrete numbers rather than solving this problem significantly more efficiently.
That's, like... I don't even know. Feels infantilizing to me. Or what am I missing?