Comments on: In App Purchase - A Bag Of Hurt

By: App Store: 1.5 Billion Apps Served - Blog - 148Apps - iPhone App and Game Reviews and News

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:25:42 +0000

[...] there are many discussed problems with the app store from a developer prospective, it has really taken off with consumers. The word [...]

By: Redth

Redth — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 02:01:54 +0000

I agree completely. I’ve been saying this from day 1. I’m most annoyed at how they handle subscriptions though. Or don’t. It would have been way easier for them to put right in the app store $0.99/month so the customer knows rate away what they’re getting. Let’s not forget we’re not allowed to put pricing info in the app store description, so we can’t really even say more to potential customers other than “this is a subscription based app”, which who knows how effective that will be.

I too have a push notifications app, and a business model of selling an app for a one time price and then supporting it with ongoing costs just doesn’t make sense.

So now, I need to nag users every so often to ‘purchase’ more time, I need to incur more costs by tracking subscriptions myself, and the user by no fault of my own, is not very well warned what they’re getting into when they pay for the app in the first place, since I HAVE to charge them for it.

Apple screwed this one up big time.

By: bugeye

bugeye — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:47:44 +0000

Thanks for the post. My partner and I are having a similar dilemma with our forthcoming app, which uses push notifications. Luckily, our app is still somewhat useful without the notifications, so I think we could manage to sell it for a small price and then offer the push service as an add-on.

I think Apple is afraid that if people could try before they buy, even with 1 or 2 dollar apps, that they would lose the benefit of impulse purchases. I have bought many apps that I rarely, if ever, use today. Would I have spent the money if I could have tried them first (I’m looking at you, super monkey ball)?

By: shanec

shanec — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:50:35 +0000

I think if free apps are allowed in-app purchase the entire economics of the store will change to the traditional shareware model, the quality of the apps on the store will rise, and customers will generally be happier. However, I also think that Apple may be concerned with this model since they still have to pay for all the download bandwidth for what would become a predominantly free store. Not to mention that in-app purchase adds some overhead to developers when adding it to an app (coding logic plus tracking of purchases) and this would tend to hinder some devs ability to publish on the store. In the end I think allowing free apps to do in-app purchase would be a good thing but that Apple will take a go-it-slow approach as they do with many things.

By: Caleb

Caleb — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:40:24 +0000

Amen, I still can’t believe with the add-ons Apple still gets 30% but they no longer take care of all the things that made it a great deal before all the hosting and such of the content. It’s causing me to reevaluate an application that I have that accesses data online, soon I’ll be able to bundle the data with the application. It’s almost better to make an entirely new app that charges a higher price for the convenience than to build this functionality into the existing app as a paid upgrade.

Though I could see so many developers who are short sighted about things turning everything into a scummy add-on if the rate were any less. Apple would do well to have interviewed developers and learn what sort of business models they want. The business models in place and being encouraged have the stink of too much MBA and not enough of the interests of the developers and users.