4 ms·
As a developer of a pro app in a niche market trying to make a living on the app store, i can tell you those 30% are what prevents me from working full time on
by bsaul 7y ago
As a developer of a pro app in a niche market trying to make a living on the app store, i can tell you those 30% are what prevents me from working full time on my app.
- rbrtl 7y agoCould you elaborate on this a little? I understand that Apple only takes 30% the first year and then they drop their commission to 15%. Is the commission on the purchase price of the app what makes it too expensive, or is it too great a cut out of your in app revenue?
- scarface74 7y agoIf your app was such a great one, you couldn’t convince your customers to pay enough to make up the difference?
- sls 7y agoMarking things up 43% generally impacts sales.
- scarface74 7y agoIf it is a “specialized”,”pro” niche app people are usually willing to spend more. It’s hard to make a living selling a niche app to price sensitive people. Also if it is a niche app, with a small addressable market, how do you continue making money on it since their is no facility for upgrade pricing - especially since you have to keep releasing updates to support newer devices and new screen sizes?
- taneq 7y agoIf it's a niche app, I'd imagine you would monetize it differently than a 99c clicker game (eg. sell a subscription to the app on your website, or supply it as a companion to hardware you sell, or something) and the app itself would most likely be free to install off the web store. I've seen companies get around the upgrade pricing question by just releasing a new version of their app every year and deprecating the old one.
- bsaul 7y ago"people are usually willing to spend more" : not in my case ( and probably many other) when i say it is a niche market i mean it not only in terms of number of customers, but also in term of potential generated revenues. there are businesses , especially in artistic fields, where people simply aren't willing to spend a lot of money on accessories, even if they are useful to their job. now i'm not saying i will never be able to be profitable enough. just that with my current marketshare ( which is very good on a local scale, but not yet worldwide), those 30% are what makes the difference. ps : as for the revenue model, i had to invent some kind of pay per use model, based on in app purchases.
- rbrtl 7y agoI think perhaps your business model isn't as solid as you might think. Producing an app is not a free pass to live on the revenue, and the market capture is an important part. I'm not an app developer, I'm in the music industry (day job in IT infra), but it seems to me there are some people projecting their bad business sense onto Apple. As per my other comment in this thread, and the reply someone made for me, the commission drops on subscription based apps, could you not use a subscription, rather than your pay-per-use system (which sounds like a creative workaround, kudos) and then you'll get the benefit of the tax rolloff. Trying to make your own way in this world is damn hard work, and if a business model falls apart because one needs to "pay taxes," Apple will not be the biggest problem for very long. I'm sure most here would agree that it stinks that Apple are demanding a 30% tax whilst paying ~0% to the U.S. Government, but that is the way of things for now.
- 7y ago
- krrrh 7y agoThere are thousands of desktop app developers that never got out of the hobby stage because they couldn’t get past the costs of processing payments, managing refunds, managing download servers, implementing licensing frameworks, implementing a smooth upgrade process, search engine optimization, establishing enough trust with users that they are confident they aren’t installing malware infected software, marketing, push notification infrastructure, and probably a few other things I’m not thinking of. It’s probable that 30% is too much to pay for help with all of that, but people too often act like Apple’s just taxing them and providing no commensurate value at all.
- bsaul 7y agoi think you also forget that many people buy ipads because of apps created by developers ( in my case, i believe my app is the direct reason for the sale of my customer's ipad pro). and that developpers need to buy apple hardware to build and distribute on the store. those 30% come in addition to all the revenue generated by hardware sales, because of independant app developers.
- scarface74 7y agoSo your customers are willing to pay at minimum $799 for an iPad Pro but don’t value your product enough for you to charge enough to make it a sustainable business? Just maybe it’s a product market fit issue?
- bsaul 7y agoOver the life of the ipad, they'll have paid me more than the ipad. But it'll be over a few years. It's a market with a few hundreds potential users (maybe a thousand) per country, not more.
- gorgoiler 7y agoPart of what makes it so galling is because Apple has those competencies in spades anyway (SREs, designers, datacenters, bizdev.) Another aspect is that the App Store feels like a value-add for the actual marketed products — iPhones and iPads — and not something you are ever explicitly buying. It doesn’t show up on the receipt. People talk about buying a new iPhone, or getting then latest iPad. No one ever goes to the Apple store to buy the lates access to the App Store. As such, Apple’s cut feels like it’s everything from cheeky to an abuse of their “monopoly” in the providers of iOS devices marketplace.