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Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

(www.apple.com)
830 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 18 Nov 20 11:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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tabs_masterrace ◴[18 Nov 20 14:11 UTC] No.25136896[source]▶
Are you kidding me? This is great news for indies and small companies, to which I count myself, and I will be making 15% more money. Dude, I'm really happy reading this announcement today, thanks Apple, what else is there to say? I think some of you might have trust issues, and are stuck in a spiral of negativity, it's getting a bit weird. Now Google please follow!
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1. paulpan ◴[18 Nov 20 19:18 UTC] No.25141112[source]▶
Not the OP but I think your reaction is exactly what Apple is hoping for here - contentment with more money in your pocket.

But it also shows behavioral economics at work: developers have been so anchored to the 30% split that this change looks amazing, but why isn't the 15% the norm regardless of revenue size? Effectively Apple is "settling" or "bribing" small developers with this change, so they aren't compelled to join the antitrust movement led by bigger players.

From a business standpoint, Apple is trying to splinter the critics into various factions. A bit extreme analogy but it's akin to inciting conflict within the opposition - actually almost textbook monopolistic behavior. Segment the market by offering tiered incentives.

This reminds me a bit of the Netflix stance on net neutrality. They were for until they grew big enough and could pay off ISPs. ISPs essentially created the proverbial moat for Netflix.