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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 nat
by black_puppydog 4y ago
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?
- fungiblecog 4y agoYep, in the old days you would provide the ability to set a price. now we need teams of marketers to introduce pointless complexity...
- barumrho 4y agoOne 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.
- black_puppydog 4y agoShouldn'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...
- barumrho 4y agoThis 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.
- seydor 4y agothat's quite desireable, i mean it's what everything else in the world does.
- delaaxe 4y agoNo, not every good in the world is priced in US dollars and presented as a random number that changes every day
- seydor 4y agopretty much every good is sold on ebay
- nicoburns 4y agoNot everything sold on ebay is priced in dollars either.
- seydor 4y agothat was my point
- kergonath 4y agoI 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).
- xxpor 4y agoThey could offer stickiness settings, like only change the price once the FX rate has moved 10%.
- 4y ago
- kaba0 4y agoHow 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.
- PeterisP 4y agoThe 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.
- kybernetyk 4y agoBut 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.
- Idiot211 4y agoDoes that 59.99 include VAT at 20%?
- oakesm9 4y agoIt does, yes
- miskin 4y agoInteresting 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.
- mr_toad 4y agoApparently invoices can be obtained by contacting customer support.
- __ryan__ 4y agoNot 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.
- fatnoah 4y agoThe press release implies that the chosen price points are "approachable" for app store customers.
- desmond373 4y agoProbably trying to reduce the number of sevens around the place
- threeseed 4y agoLong 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.
- kneebonian 4y ago> 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.
- TAForObvReasons 4y agoAmazon used Oracle until a few years ago, Google accounting teams used Excel, etc.
- varispeed 4y agoWhen 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. Crazy.
- vanshg 4y agoThat should be for the merchant to decide, though, not Apple
- kergonath 4y agoApple is the merchant.
- TillE 4y agoYes 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.
- threeseed 4y agoIt'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.
- throwaway2037 4y agoYou wrote: <<And as Apple demonstrated in Netherlands>> That sounds interesting! Can you share a link?
- hackernewds 4y ago
- cactus2093 4y agoIdk, 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.
- seydor 4y ago
- hackernewds 4y ago> they do it because they can against the desires of the entire global community of developers. the hallmarks of a true monopoly
- seydor 4y agoNot a monopoly, at least not outside US. But a very capricious high end electronics brand
- guelo 4y agoDepends how you define the market. They are 100% a monopoly for the iOS apps market.
- sokoloff 4y agoAnd Ferrari is a 100% monopoly supplier of Ferrari engines.
- kaba0 4y agoThe 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.
- sokoloff 4y agoMy parents get by entirely fine without a mobile device (smart or feature). It's convenient, but not required.
- JonathonW 4y agoApple 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.
- BulgarianIdiot 4y agoThank you for clarifying this. This is such an Apple thing to do. Frankly it doesn't matter what the exact price is. All economics are approximate.
- decadancer 4y agoI 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
- alexandre_m 4y agoThe economics of all of that seem sketchy to me. It sounds like the main North American market is subsidizing the apps being produced and sold worldwide. Does the same logic apply for other virtual good such as digital music elsewhere?
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago> A developer can't just set a price for something? Are you crazy? And miss out on yet another opportunity for Apple to rub their stank on something?
- crgt 4y agoSupport for pricing tiers above 1k for one big thing.
- GeekyBear 4y ago> 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. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/apple-announces-sweeping-changes-to-app-store-pricing/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/apple-announces-swee...
- tshaddox 4y agoI 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.
- yreg 4y agoApple did this from the very start when they didn’t make much of the App Store. I think they just like the simplicity and cleanness in the store. I like it as well.
- pedrovhb 4y agoWhy 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.
- tw600040 4y agoThey 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.