[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.