Slashdot Mirror
Apple To Offer iOS Developers 85-15 Revenue Split; Debut Paid App Store Search Ads (theverge.com)
Apple says it will now take a smaller cut of commission from app developers provided they have customers who stick with their subscription model for longer than a year. Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, told The Verge in an interview that the company will revise the 70-30 split for such developers to 85-15. In addition, the company will also begin showing search ads for apps in its iOS App Store search results. Also, the company says it is speeding up app review times "to the point where 50 percent of submitted apps are now reviewed in 24 hours, and 90 percent are reviewed within 48 hours." From the report: If the new subscription model becomes widely adopted, it will represent a fundamental shift in the economics of the App Store. Developers will be incentivized to sell their apps for a recurring fee instead of a one-time cost. It could change the way consumers pay for certain apps, but it also presents a massive opportunity for developers, many of whom feel the app economy has been become moribund in recent years. And as iPhone sales growth slows, a move to app subscriptions is another way for Apple wring more profits from its existing user base.Apple columnist John Gruber has more details.
You might look skeptically upon Apple's claim that review times have sped up. How could they possibly have sped up to the process to a day from a week?
Yet, it is the case. Every single person I know submitting iOS apps has had every app approved within a day, sometimes just a few hours.
And it's not like they are just not looking at anything, in one case I head about someone who submitted an app update, the reviewer found a crashing bug, the developer fixed and resubmitted and it was approved - all within the same day!
That alone was a HUGE boon to app development as it made a lot of customers very cranky a change could not go out quickly. It should also eliminate a ton of emergency review requests developers were sending to Apple, so it probably helps Apple also.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
30% is hardly bad when you consider that you don't have to deal with payments at all or any refunding of those. If your average sale price is low (as it tends to be with apps) then transaction fees could eat up close to that amount alone.
Difference is an Android developer doesn't have to pay Google 30% if they don't want to. They can always release their Android app via a different store, or offer a direct download from their website. Heck, they can set up their own store if they want (as Amazon has done). They have to pay 30% only if they want to sell it in Google's store. This makes it exactly like the brick and mortar analogue, where the retail store takes a cut of the price where your product is sold.
But with Apple, the only way to distribute your app to users is via their App Store, where you have to pay the Apple tax (be it 30% or 15%). In any other industry, this would be an illegal market restriction. What if you could buy gas for your Ford car only from Mobil gas stations? Not for any technical reason, but because Ford said they needed to do it to insure the quality of the gasoline you put into your Ford vehicle?
But it's Apple, so people's eyes glaze over and their brain shuts down. Even Apple's argument that it "needs" to do it for security doesn't fly. They're responsible for securing their hardware and OS. If people want their apps secured, there should be multiple companies competing to provide that service. And the people can choose which of these protection services they prefer to use. Exactly like Google does - you can use their Play store and whatever screening/protection they provide, or you can use someone else's store, or you can choose to use a store which doesn't purport to offer any protection at all. In an ideal world, Google would have their own iOS store, and Apple would have an Android store, and other companies would have their own stores for both platforms. And whichever company provided the screening and protection services customers want most would end up gaining a larger share of the market. (Apps would also be interchangeable between stores too, like it doesn't matter if you buy your TV from Best Buy or Target, but that's another argument.)