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Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

(www.apple.com)
830 points todsacerdoti | 4 comments | 18 Nov 20 11:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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pja ◴[18 Nov 20 12:43 UTC] No.25136113[source]▶
I’m seeing a lot of positive comments on HN about this: to me it seems to be purely a cynical piece of PR on Apple’s part.

They hope to significantly reduce the pressure on politicians to take a close look at their App store practices by significantly reducing the absolute number of developers suffering the full impact whilst taking the minimum possible hit to their revenue. This has nothing to do with “doing the right thing” or “accelerating innovation” and everything to do with limiting the number of outraged letters to senators from devs, the number of newspaper interviews with prominent indie developers & so on.

Indie devs have an outsize PR impact relative to their revenue contribution, so buy them off with a smaller revenue tax that delivers outsize returns if it prevents the 30% house rake on the majority of Apple’s App Store income coming under scrutiny.

Apple / Google’s 30% take is the anti-competitive elephant in the room here, not a few crumbs thrown to small developers.

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valuearb ◴[18 Nov 20 14:25 UTC] No.25137067[source]▶
“In today’s news Apple announced the opening of its iOS platform to allow users to install any apps they want from any alternative App Store. Posters on ycombinator.com denounced the move as a cynical attempt to generate positive PR. Said one, just because Apple has listened to us and stopped doing the evil things we asked it to stop, does not mean we won’t find new things to criticize it as evil for.”
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1. pja ◴[18 Nov 20 14:29 UTC] No.25137112[source]▶
That would actually be a substantive change that would genuinely change the App market dynamics. This ... is not that.
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2. valuearb ◴[18 Nov 20 16:15 UTC] No.25138489[source]▶
Spoken by someone who is clearly not an Apple App Store developer. If you were an App developer like myself, you'd realize what a huge change this was.

First, most Apple devs don't care about alternate app stores. Those provide nearly zero additional revenues to devs on every platform they are available.

Second, most Apple devs don't want the Apple App Store to lose it's primacy, they realize that it's hugely beneficial to their revenues. The security, the app vetting, the single sign on, single purchase account, and easy subscription management and refund features, is a huge reason that we make far more from the App Store than Google Play, despite Androids SIX TIMES larger installed base. Apple attracts the best app customers and makes them super comfortable with buying and subscribing to apps.

Most Apple developers by far largest concern was the large percentage of revenues Apple took. And they addressed that today.

At 15% we can use App Store purchasing for far more things, and I'm already having those discussions with clients today.

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3. pja ◴[18 Nov 20 17:26 UTC] No.25139533[source]▶
Apple has bought off small App vendors in order to protect the 30% rake they take from the big sellers: That you’re happy with the change is not exactly surprising is it? Who wouldn’t be happy being told they’re getting a 21% revenue increase for nothing!

Meanwhile, Apple continues to use their dominant position to extract 30% of the revenue of the most profitable Apps, whilst people like you go out to bat for them. Must be great to be in Apple PR :)

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4. valuearb ◴[19 Nov 20 00:45 UTC] No.25144833{3}[source]▶
They didn’t buy us off. Most of us NEVER agreed with your loony progressive policies.