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.
Apple should long ago make the $99 an App Store fee, not tied to any provisioning certificates or code signing.
I applaud the authors of the few good extensions who went the extra 20.000 leagues. (But I still reluctantly switched to Ungoogled Chromium.)
Well that obviously didn't work. I got rid of my Iphone, but I remember the app store as being an absolute wasteland of garbage, and discoverability was awful. I don't know if it was a slogan, or an ad campaign once, but there was this thing with "there's an app for that". Yea I guess maybe there is, but good luck finding it, and finding one that isn't riddled with ads and scammy in-app purchases, and then further good luck that the developer of it keeps paying apple 99$ 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.
The PlayStore for comparison is horrible.
Remember all apps have once been low effort apps: the first few weeks when you begin working on them. Polish comes later.
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?
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.
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.
Meaningless sentence.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
