[behnamoh]

This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app?

When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.

I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.

[cortesoft]

> Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app?

How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something.

A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run.

Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most.

There are probably many reasons for that, some of them already mentioned in sibling comments - keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers, generating revenue from the fees, etc.

Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.

[irrational]

There can’t be that many iOS developers that the $99 really affects their bottom line. I always assumed it was a barrier to entry to help discourage low effort apps.

[KeplerBoy]

Keeping low effort apps out of the store helps their bottom line. It's a second order effect.

[kccqzy]

Yes but the $99 fee doesn't just allow selling apps on the App Store. It is also required for testing the app such as on TestFlight.

Apple should long ago make the $99 an App Store fee, not tied to any provisioning certificates or code signing.

[engcoach]

Without a fee, people would make new accounts and circumvent distribution restrictions.

[leakycap]

The fee could be less and have a similar deterrent on the type of activity you describe. The real question isn't what Apple is gaining from this fee, but what they are losing.

Apple's $99 fee is annoying and feels like a waste of time and one more thing to manage.

The paid ADC program has kept me from sharing projects with other developers who would have otherwise been able to contribute (but they aren't paid devs because they'd rather have a year of Costco hotdogs than pay Apple to help me with my app for a week)

[rollcat]

Of course there are. Many browser extensions are available for all platforms except Apple's, because you need that $99/y (and a Mac) to wrap (and fix up) a bunch of JS you already wrote and tested everywhere else.

I applaud the authors of the few good extensions who went the extra 20.000 leagues. (But I still reluctantly switched to Ungoogled Chromium.)

[encom]

>discourage low effort apps

Well that obviously didn't work. I got rid of my Iphone, but I remember the app store as being an absolute wasteland of garbage, and discoverability was awful. I don't know if it was a slogan, or an ad campaign once, but there was this thing with "there's an app for that". Yea I guess maybe there is, but good luck finding it, and finding one that isn't riddled with ads and scammy in-app purchases, and then further good luck that the developer of it keeps paying apple 99$ dollars every year so the app isn't delisted.

I'm not saying Google is any better. I've pretty much given up on apps and app stores at this point. If I find something new, it's something I'm made aware of via other channels (or unavoidable bullshit like mandatory app based car parking etc.).

--love Ted K.

[NoPicklez]

It certainly does discourage low effort apps.

The PlayStore for comparison is horrible.

[wobfan]

I mean you're right and you've said it yourself already, but in comparison to try Play Store there apps from the App Store are like double the quality on average. Because most of the extremely low effort bs is kept out. I still hate the fee though, dont get me wrong.

[kccqzy]

But it's asinine for developers to have to pay $99 in order to test their app, such as on TestFlight. When you have an app idea, when you are far from deciding on monetization, you just want to test out the central features of the app among friends, it's wrong to require payment for that.

Remember all apps have once been low effort apps: the first few weeks when you begin working on them. Polish comes later.

[cortesoft]

You aren’t paying $99 per app, you have to pay that once per year and you can develop as many apps as you want. $99 isn’t a huge amount.

[leakycap]

$99 is a show-stopping barrier for more people than you can possibly imagine.

Please, if you are of the mindset $99 is not a life-changing amount for someone else, I implore you to widen your world and at least stay in touch with what the average human experience is like.

The person working McDonald's who has an app idea now needs an iOS device, a Mac, and $99 of available funds. Then, remember that person is richer than many people in other countries.

$99 is a huge amount, especially given that you get nothing except a privilege that has no inherent value.

[kccqzy]

> $99 per app

Meaningless distinction. Most starting indie developers don't have more than one app anyway. It's like going to a fancy steakhouse and being offered a $99 all-you-can-eat where the only menu item is a 18oz porterhouse.

> $99 isn’t a huge amount

It isn't if this is your main job. It could be if this is merely a hobby.

[iwontberude]

They can test and iterate using simulator without spending $99

[kccqzy]

I said test among friends, i.e. potential but real users. The gulf between the simulator and TestFlight is so large that they are better considered completely different stages of testing.

Furthermore, there are so many things that can't realistically tested by the developer on the simulator.

[iwontberude]

I am sorry. You are totally right.

[AnthonyMouse]

> There are probably many reasons for that, some of them already mentioned in sibling comments

Those reasons don't really make a lot of sense:

> keeping low effort apps out

"Low effort" apps are critical to establishing demand. Small developers can't justify spending a large amount of resources on something you're not sure anybody wants. If you post the MVP and get a lot of downloads, now you know it's worth your time to make it better. If you can't post the MVP then you don't post it at all and neither the MVP nor the polished version ever exists.

That's the recipe for having an app store full of loot box games and similar trash which is known to be profitable to the developers while losing thousands of apps people might actually want to the uncertainty of not knowing that ahead of time. Which is exactly what we see. How is that in their interest?

> keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers

These are things that would imply an account creation fee rather than an annual fee, and also have nothing to doing app development where you're only installing the app on your own device.

> generating revenue from the fees

This is the thing people are complaining about. They feel as though a troll has jumped out from under a bridge to demand money without providing anything of value in return. You've already paid for the phone, now it's your phone, what gives them the right to double dip?

> Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.

That's true in a competitive market. If you don't like Apple's prices then go use one of the other app distribution services for your iPhone. Unless there isn't one, right?

[kaptainscarlet]

Yeah companies charge as much as they can getaway with

[sigmoid10]

>How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something.

It actually does - in a free market. That's, like, one of the main arguments why capitalism is good for the population and not evil. But in a gate-kept oligopoly like phones, actors can abuse the system to squeeze more money out of consumers, leaving the corporations as sole beneficiaries. That's why this kind of stuff usually gets curbed in functioning democracies.

[keerthiko]

I'm pretty sure in a free market, how much someone is willing to pay for something is what determines how much a company charges for something, not how much it cost to provide. We wouldn't have inflation of most goods/services if it was based on how much it cost to produce/provide.

[bitdivision]

True - how much someone is willing to pay matters. However in a competitive market, companies can’t just charge whatever people will pay. Competitors will undercut them, so prices should eventually align with the cost of production plus a reasonable margin.

[freedomben]

You're right, but generally in a free market competition will force prices down until they are close enough to production costs that going lower risks loss. In practice this rarely happens because we don't really have "free" markets, but rather a weird hybrid plus legal landmines all over the place.

[sigmoid10]

Nope. In free market theory (=perfect competition, no barriers to entry, unlimited buyers etc.) prices are set as the equilibrium where demand equals supply. Supply ends up being equal to marginal cost in the mathematical limit. So in this limit, companies no longer make profit because if they charge cost+epsilon, they will loose demand to other suppliers. That's literally what you learn in economics 101. Of course in the real world you won't reach that limit, but getting to it within first order is still very good for consumers. The further you go away from this free market state, the more companies can extract what consumers "are still willing to pay" (irrespective of their cost) as you say. The opposite limit is the monopoly, where consumer welfare doesn't matter at all and companies can set their prices to maximise their own profit, because they don't need to adhere to any supply curve. They can literally charge extra until people go broke for inelastic demand curves like those of basic utilities (which phones are becoming more and more).

[phanimahesh]

> capitalism is good for the population and not evil

This is the biggest lie that we keep telling ourselves. Capitalism is destroying the only place in the universe we can survive, and with the absurdly unequal wealth distribution and centralisation it enables, has caused more collective misery than any other idea in human history, in my opinion.

[ptaffs]

I agree and piling on. Capitalism is good for those with capital, the wealthy few. Then wonder where they got the capital, and mostly it's something environmentally bad, like the extraction industry such as coal and oil.

[mypornaccount]

if you are commenting on this website you almost definitely fit the definition of the “wealthy few”.

[jxjnskkzxxhx]

> It actually does - in a free market

Meaningless sentence.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

Free markets have absolutely nothing to do with capitalism. You can have markets without capitalism. You can have free trade without capitalism, and you can have unfree trade with capitalism too.

It’s one of the great achievements of capitalism that it managed to convince people that trade == capitalism and that without capitalism you are reduced to the Soviet Union, because no other options are possible.

[robertlagrant]

> It’s one of the great achievements of capitalism that it managed to convince people that trade == capitalism and that without capitalism you are reduced to the Soviet Union, because no other options are possible.

Never heard anyone say this before, although it may be pretty much the case[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_trade_of_the_Soviet_Un...

[FranzFerdiNaN]

If you criticise capitalism one of the most likely responses you're going to get is ''so you want to become communist like the SU"?

And that wkkipedia article is of course not proving that trade equals capitalism (or are you saying that America stops being capitalistic if Trumps dream of a self-sufficient nation somehow succeeds?). Trade is trade. There was trade in the past when capitalism did not yet exist and there will be trade in the future when capitalism no longer exists.

[robertlagrant]

> Trade is trade. There was trade in the past when capitalism did not yet exist and there will be trade in the future when capitalism no longer exists.

Indeed. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise. Fuedal lords traded. Totalitarian states traded. We know there was and is trade.

[cortesoft]

Even in a free market, not every product has perfect competition. Luxury brands always charge a lot more than it costs to make a product, because there are other factors that go into price.

[kaonwarb]

Only for commodities, and even then only sometimes.

[timewizard]

> A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money.

No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand. This does provide opportunities to make more money during some periods than others. If you have a monopoly then you can ignore this and just pick what makes you the most.

> Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most.

It's absolutely a bespoke filter to prevent spam and automated misbehavior. Admittedly there does seem to be a resulting overall quality difference between iOS apps and other platforms.

> Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.

Business models are legal or not. You choose to play by the rules or you don't play.

[ndr42]

>> A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money.

> No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand.

I read an interview a long long time ago (with Jobs, Schiller or Cook - I don't remember) where they were saying explicitly that Apple charge the amount that get them the most money not marketshare. I remember the times when analysts where obsessed with market share and that apple had to lose because they were to expensive. I don't hear that opinion that often today.

[II2II]

At the time, eroding marketshare was a legitimate concern. It takes money to develop products, and without continuous development they would not remain competitive. Whether they liked it or not, marketshare is a factor in making the most money since you need to spread out the cost of development. Many companies were failing at the time, including those who made high end workstations because of that. Many years ago, I read an article about how the development of Alpha processors could not keep up simply because Intel could invest far more into R&D.

[timewizard]

That's what they say. Anyways it would be a clever way of rephrasing "many of our products have very low demand and high lock in."

[cortesoft]

Demand is a factor in determining what price will generate them the most money in the long term, but it is not the only factor. Competition is another factor, like you mentioned.

They want to prevent spam and automated misbehavior because that will maximize their long term profit.

Business models can be illegal, but not your pricing.

[realusername]

> No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand.

In a market without competition (such as the mobile duopoly), that's how it works. The customer has no choice anyways so no price comparison can happen.

[aerostable_slug]

I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission. I'm not sure a hundred bucks is the right number, but it's not fair to say all they do is host the file.

[neilv]

> I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission.

By "fairly rigorous", do you mean "fickle, random"?

[lm411]

Not even close compared to Google Play and their review and appeal process.

Recently I had an app for a customer. Approved easily by Apple. Rejected by Google.

The reason given by Google was completely meaningless in the context of the app. When this happens, I usually make a bullshit change, increment the version, and submit again. That was also rejected in this case. I asked for more info and they provided a meaningless screenshot of the app - that was all. So I appealed. That was also useless! They provided no info to help.

Eventually I just created a new Google Play account and re-submitted a new version of the app, and it was accepted near immediately.

I've had some annoying experiences with Apples review process but it is gold compared to Google Play.

[rahimnathwani]

You have to pay $99/year even if you only want to use the app on your own device.

You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days.

They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.

[mitemte]

What’s worse is it used to be 90 days. Apple changed it to 7 days years ago.

[demosthanos]

90 days is still absurd. I have custom apps I install on my Android phones once per phone. I go years without bothering to rebuild them.

[akutlay]

I would guess they do it because they want to minimize the chance that someone will install an unapproved app to someone’s phone and cause harm. I know it’s already pretty hard but Apple seems to be very particular when it comes to this.

[phanimahesh]

Popup on app open that warns app is sideloaded?

There are simpler and more usable options that are more defensible than what they do today.

[prmoustache]

That is not their job.

[fmbb]

> You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days.

Does this mean you lose data, or is data retained when reinstalling?

[wpm]

OK, then don't charge me until I submit something to the App Store.

I should be able to self-sign an app for longer than a week on a free developer account.

[bigyabai]

"fair" would be letting me sideload if I didn't want to go through Apple's vetting. Their expensive review process is only required because they decide it's arbitrarily necessary and unavoidable.

[8note]

apple could easily pay that with its money printer commision on app sales or on its money printer iphone sales, both of which are inpart because of the app developers.

whats the value add of rigourously validating an app that youre only running on your own phone?

[notnmeyer]

i’d guess it’s more to keep extremely low effort submissions out of the app store.

[Gigachad]

Which is not unreasonable for something listed in the App Store. It is unreasonable that you can’t sideload though.

[phire]

I'm pretty sure the $99 fee is explicitly there to prevent "normal" users from side-loading.

[eddythompson80]

It could be playing 2 roles, acting as a limiting gate for the App Store spam and preventing a simple 2 step tutorial to enable side loading.

[notnmeyer]

yeah, this also makes sense

[7speter]

Whats seemingly more absurd is you already paid for the phone AND the Mac you have to develop for iOS devices for

[KolibriFly]

Feels even sillier in an era where people are trying to find creative, sustainable uses for older hardware

[latexr]

> Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit".

No, they do not. That is how you are interpreting their actions. It’s obviously not the narrative they are pushing, that would be utterly absurd. The narrative Apple pushes over and over is that it’s your device, and that what you do with it is private and stays with it. Outright saying the device is theirs and they only let you do what they choose would be incredibly stupid, and their marketing is not incompetent.

Mind you, this doesn’t mean your interpretation (which is shared by many people) is wrong. On the contrary, it has merit. But it makes no sense to say Apple is pushing it as a narrative, that’s not what the expression means.

[lillecarl]

I recall seeing a lot of "in your hand", "on you device", "tailored for you" and such in their keynotes and press material.

[rfoo]

Apple pushes a narrative that their devices are secure (not private, but secure). And my less tech-savvy friends sincerely believe that it's due to it being a walled garden, with curated software only.

Apple made no attempt clarifying this.

[notnullorvoid]

I believe they are talking about Apple's anti-trust legal defense narrative. Not the marketing narrative, which is in direct conflict, and maybe false advertising.

[rkagerer]

This is why I switched to Android 10 years ago. Unfortunately the grass isn't looking much greener over there these days.

I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

In this very narrow case, the grass on the Android side is much greener: You can install your own APKs on an Android device without paying anyone at all, without having to upload anything anywhere, and without requiring any particular device to build the APK in the first place. You don't even need to touch the bootloader or root it; you just toggle a setting to allow the installation and it works.

[freedomben]

For now at least. There have been articles recently about how Google is looking to change that

[sampullman]

The Android fee is only $25, but in my experience everything around the submission process is at least 4x worse, so it evens out.

At least Apple has humans doing review and support.

[prmoustache]

But you don'have to pay to sideload your app and have it stay forever on your device.

[lmm]

> how is it even justified

Money is nice, they can charge it and people will pay them. Would be letting their shareholders down not to charge it really. I'm surprised they haven't tried bumping it up yet.

[asimovfan]

what is it that you "love" about Apple?

[theshackleford]

Not op but...

It started out originally that I just needed a UNIX/Linux like but I also needed at the time better support for some propietary stuff than linux had, which is how I entered the fold.

What has kept me a customer has been their quality of service over the 15 years I have been a customer, which has more than made up for the extra cost of their hardware.

I get an OS I find reasonable to use, in a hardware package I like (give or take quite a few years there) and generally at this point still know that if something goes wrong the apple of today (but maybe not tomorrow) will look after me as a customer. If this changes, i'll go elsewhere, shunt OSX off and just go back to linux on the desktop I suppose. I'm not wedded to them. If they had'nt released the silicon variants when they did I was already getting to jump ship over to Lenovo/Dell land (at the time.)

Phones are a bit different, i've still received brilliant service from them in that regard, but I tend to flip back and forwards between android and iOS depending on my mood at the time.

[carlosjobim]

What other serious business to business agreements can you enter into without spending at least $100? The fee is not to cover technical costs, but administration costs.

Welcome to the world of having a small business. Be happy it's only $100. Your fees for cost-of-doing business is many times higher for a hot dog stand or any other thing you can come up with.