IMO there is one more factor in play: pricing inertia once “market prices” are set ie why are upfront mobile app prices free or peanuts? A big reason is cause

IMO there is one more factor in play: pricing inertia once “market prices” are set ie why are upfront mobile app prices free or peanuts? A big reason is cause they started that way. If mobile app prices started at closer to desktop app prices at the beginning, we’d probably have a much different mobile app marketplace today. Another example: developer salaries in the US compared to rest of world, where they’re much lower even after normalization. I posit that a key reason was the easy money VC years around 2010, and they just stayed high ever since. I’m sure there’s a proper economic term for this phenomenon :)