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.

This news doesn't mean people shouldn't continue to put pressure on Apple and legislators to address the core issue (app store competition), but it's still really good news for small developers.

It should also solidly put down all of the arguments we were seeing about whether indie devs and lawsuits putting pressure on Apple and legislators are at all worthwhile. A drop in app fees by 15% is a substantial win, and the reason that drop happened is because Apple is now scared of critics, bad PR, and how that might impact future legislation against them.

The number of hot takes I was seeing about how the Apple/Epic fight benefited literally no one and it was just two companies arguing about who got to take all the money... it's very clear from this program that the overall pressure on Apple has been making a difference.

It's not so large a difference that devs should now stop fighting for better terms, but it's positive to see Apple at least partially show signs of cracking, or at least acknowledge on some level that they're frightened about the potential outcome of this fight. And there are a lot of small devs who are going to be making a lot more money just because of this minor victory.