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An App Store For iPhone Software
Steve Jobs demonstrated a new "App Store" that will be pushed out to all iPhones in June. It's available now in beta. This will be the exclusive avenue developers will use to get their iPhone apps, written to the newly released SDK, to customers. Developers will get 70% of the proceeds from sales of their goods on the App store, with no further charges for hosting, credit-card processing, etc. Jobs called this "the best deal going to distribute applications in the mobile space."
"And there's no charge for developers to distribute free applications"
Well... now I'm excited
Actually this could be a very sweet deal for developers.
... but it seems to me that even with Apple taking a 30% cut, the exposure that the App store gives could provide the developers with WAY more sales than they could manage to get going solo.
Now, I didn't read the details so maybe apple will prevent developers from selling their apps direct AND going through the App store
It's kind of like the Record Labels and Recording Artists. The only difference being that recording artists don't get to keep 70% of their sales and they usually take huge cash advances to record their albums that they have to pay back with absolutely no guarantee that they'll sell enough records to pay it back plus they're in a contract that promises the label X number of further records.
No I don't have a problem with Apple's App store as long as they're providing a valuable service for the developers and on the surface it appears that they are. When they take the majority of the sales and lock the developers into contracts promising exclusive deals with the App store for years to come THEN I'll say the developers are better going solo. To me this seems like the high-exposure radio station of indie software marketing.
You must be new, welcome to the Internet. Here on the Internet you are required to view any publicly held company as evil and any effort on their part to charge for a service as pure, unadulterated greed preferably attributed to their CEO or other high-ranking executive. Corporations should provide as many possible services for free, regardless of the time, capital, and human resources required to develop and run those services or products. Any efforts of corporations to charge money in voluntary exchange for their services or products is to be likened to highway robbery, extortion, or in the case of particularly large corporations, rape. I hope these guidelines have helped. May your future be full of forum discussions loathing corporations and their evil/greedy ways.
give me a break... MSDN costs a lot more than $99. Almost everyone charges more. You will spend 10x that much to join the program for the blackberry. $99 to join the program, get all the tools, simulator, docs, dev videos, hosting, update service, etc. I know it's a common sentiment on slashdot that everyone should get everything for free and everyone (else) should work without pay to give you everything you want free, but the attitude is getting tiresome.
E pluribus unum