Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

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.

Agreed. And it's frustrating to see most people getting tricked this easily.

In the old days, when telecommunications devices and networks were getting monopolized like this, we'd break the company up into smaller entities, and then regulate the hell out of them, especially on monopolized/duopolized prices.

In a just world, Apple would never be allowed to set the app store tax at all, a group of state or federal regulators would have strict price caps set by the public at large and enforced by state or federal law. (This is how many places still handle Electricity and Natural Gas. This is approximately what we did to AT&T, when they tried this same crap).

If you own a monopoly/duopoly, you should expect to be heavily regulated like one. If you don't like that, stop monopolizing that market. This isn't rocket science, it's the conservative position on this issue.