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Apple Charging to Keep Apps in Store

17 points by marbiru ↗ HN
I'm a hobbyist developer who made three very small, ad-free apps. Apple charges $99 per year for anyone to make apps (in stark contrast to the $25 one-off fee that Google charges). Since I'm not actively working on my apps right now, I don't want to pay Apple another $99 this year. But my existing free apps will stay in the store for those who want to download them, right?

No. Apple's Developer Support claimed on the phone that keeping an existing app in the store if the developer isn't paying the annual $99 tribute would be a safety concern, "like an airport letting an unscanned bag through security". This really, really doesn't make sense: aside from the other disanalogies, if anything it's more like an airline kicking out a bag that they've already scanned and deemed safe because the owner refuses to pay them again in perpetuity.

The other justification Apple gave for the $99 per year fee was the storage and delivery costs of delivering my apps. For the record, my largest app is 40mb.

I have two suggestions for Apple. The first is a no-brainer: any authorised app should be allowed to stay in the store for as long as the platforms it works on are still supported, without the developer having to pay an annual tribute.

The second is a bigger step, but I think a reasonable one: Apple should have a free tier for small app developers. For example, it should not require an annual paid subscription to create and maintain free, ad-free apps.

Big tech companies are under a lot more scrutiny these days for abuse of market power, and this strikes me as the kind of reason why: I just don't believe that in a competitive market the equilibrium cost for a basic developer account would be anything close to $99 per year, or that Apple would kick existing apps out of its store unless the developer keeps paying every year.

28 comments

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notlukesky
What are the apps by the way?

In the pre-Apple days, mobile app makers on J2ME, BREW, Symbian etc had to give up to 70 percent to marketplaces and spend potentially up to 50 thousand dollars or more to code sign each app across multiple device types. $99 for code signing all the individual developers apps across all devices and publishing it was unheard of at the time and truly shocking compared to the old paradigm. Goolge then made it free and only later charged $25.

marbiru
I didn't want to look like I was hawking something so I didn't include a link but these are my apps: https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/uri-bram/id1222415460

That's interesting, about the pre-Apple days, I didn't know that. Do you know how/why Google manages at $0 per year though (with a $25 one-off fee), while Apple charges $99 per year? It's really hard for me to believe that Apple's price would survive in any kind of competitive market, but I'm willing to be convinced.

wallflower
Apple has always been a premium brand. And it is reflected in the “Apple tax” (Mac and $99/yr annual developer subscription). If you ever have the opportunity to attend an Apple organized developer event (WWDC usually), you will feel that they truly want to provide the technology, SDKs, and support to enable you and your team to build the best app experiences that you can.

For the equivalent experience that users now demand and expect on Android, it is usually much more difficult and nuanced to achieve.

Google has gotten better at treating developers with love, but it is probably not their main priority.

marbiru
To be honest my experience developing for Apple has been pretty unambiguously bad. For example, for (at least) 6 months there was a bug where users couldn't submit an App Store review unless they had a "sufficiently distinct username", but instead of notifying the user in any way to change their username the review just wouldn't submit. When I reported to Apple Support that multiple users had told me they were unable to submit reviews, Apple shunted me around from department to department and generally wasted a vast amount of my time with each department claiming it was another department's issue. To my knowledge this bug was never publicly disclosed, even though it affected every app on the store (and especially small apps that rely entirely on reviews to be noticed by new customers). And (at least in my interactions with them) Apple didn't seem to care. It sounds like your experience with them has been different, which is great, but I can't say I felt they were enabling me to build the best app I can.
jamesmp98
> Do you know how/why Google manages at $0 per year though (with a $25 one-off fee), while Apple charges $99 per year? It's really hard for me to believe that Apple's price would survive in any kind of competitive market, but I'm willing to be convinced. IIRC, Apple has a majority share in the US smartphone market and strong brand loyalty among it's users

In fairness there is tons of scamware, and general garbage in the play store.

marbiru
>In fairness there is tons of scamware, and general garbage in the play store.

I've heard this from a few people here, but I'm not convinced that the $99 fee is the relevant differentiator -- Apple already has stricter requirements to get into the store (e.g. apps have to be "original" and can't duplicate functionality of an existing app), and it feels to me like for any particular form of scamware Apple can just ban it directly -- I'm not sure how the $99 per year fee helps, because if anything scammers/spammers are more effective at making money off their apps than most of us so should be more willing to swallow the fee. (Also I'm still annoyed that Apple is kicking out apps that have already paid the fee and been approved/authorised -- no matter what the relevant filter is those apps have already passed it)

cynix
I think in addition to hosting/distribution costs, a reason they charge an annual fee is to weed out spammers, which I think is a good idea. The fee is low enough (equivalent to about 2 cups of coffee per month) that any serious developer should have no problem paying it.
marbiru
How does the annual fee weed out spammers exactly? Are there examples on Android of the kind of spam apps you're worried about?
tonyedgecombe
It's much harder for them to be anonymous when they had to get their credit card out.
marbiru
I'm not trying to be combative but... doesn't Google's one-time fee to make an account do that just as effectively? Or an annual $10 fee, or whatever?
cynix
Spammers are less likely to keep their apps in the store if there’s an ongoing cost. Or to submit it at all, if the initial cost is high enough.
marbiru
Also, I don't want to sound hokey but... $99 might be low enough for your definition of a "serious developer" but it's not affordable for a hobbyist, a student or someone starting out in a low-income country, for example. I can make, host and distribute a website for $0 because nobody owns that ecosystem, and big companies like Github and Heroku think it's worth their while to offer free hosting and distribution to small developers -- I think Apple would do the same if they were in a competitive market, but they charge monopoly pricing because they're (currently) able to.
tonyedgecombe
but it's not affordable for a hobbyist, a student or someone starting out in a low-income country, for example

Neither is an Apple computer which makes your whole point moot.

cynix
> it's not affordable for a hobbyist, a student or someone starting out in a low-income country, for example.

These are probably not their target audience then.

> they charge monopoly pricing because they're (currently) able to.

iOS has a 22% market share according to the first result on Google. That's not even remotely close to a monopoly.

marbiru
> iOS has a 22% market share according to the first result on Google.

that's worldwide, in the U.S. they're at 45%. And it's not a traditional duopoly in that there's huge lock-in -- I can buy Coke one day and switch to Pepsi the next (or whatever), but once a customer is on a particular phone they're locked into that platform's app store. So, yeah, I think they're exercising monopolistic pricing when selling access to their app-store.

cynix
Why does a higher market share in the US have any significance in this discussion? According to [1] the US only accounts for about 10% of the global smartphone market. As an Australian, I couldn't care less about their US market share.

And even if we go by 45%, that's still not close to a monopoly. You're not by any means forced to publish apps on their app store.

[1] https://www.countriestoday.com/smartphone-users-by-country/

marbiru
hmm, ok, I take your point that the US share specifically doesn't really matter so long as Apple is pricing the developer account globally -- it definitely matters to me (in the sense that many of my users are American iPhone owners) but maybe not for the pricing analysis overall. My bad.

I still do think that Apple is employing monopolistic pricing on the app store, though -- they don't have a monopoly on the smartphone market, for sure, and indeed their smartphone prices are (certainly premium but still) constrained by the prices of other competing phones. Once a customer owns an iPhone, though, the Apple app store is the only way to reach them. And Apple's pricing for developer accounts seems to reflect that - I really don't believe $99 is the equilibrium price here, nor that policies like kicking apps out the store as soon as the developer stops paying would survive in a competitive market.

I'm absolutely not forced to publish my apps to Apple, and obviously I'm taking the option not to publish them there now. And please don't get me wrong, my apps are super trivial and nobody will actually miss them when they're gone. But it does seem sad to me that both me and my potential future users will lose out (in whatever small way) because of Apple's non-competitive developer account pricing, even when I would have been very happy to pay the fair market rate for a developer account.

marbiru
also.. for the record, my main complaint is that they're kicking off apps that they've already approved if the developer doesn't continue to pay $99 every year. I don't see how that's justified by weeding out spammers or their target audience for developers or anything else.
cynix
As an end user, I would expect apps to be updated at least as frequently as once a year, given that they release major OS upgrades and new hardware each year. Frankly, if you can't be bothered to update your apps, I'd rather not see them in the store. Apple is optimising for user experience here, and developers who don’t keep their apps up to date for the best user experience clearly isn’t Apple’s top priority.
skinnymuch
There are definitely some apps I have or currently enjoy that have not been updated in a year. I’d much rather have them than not.
cynix
Sure, if the developer is willing to pay the annual fee and not get their money’s worth, that’s their choice. But the fee will likely discourage such practices. OP is living proof that there are devs who don’t want to pay the fee if they don’t intend to update their apps.
altsyset
I hope this and many other factors contribute for major PWA adoption.
brador
Would be cool if there was a single publisher on the app store who devs could dump their free apps with and would then aggregate/split the costs between all the devs involved.

$99 might be steep, but $10? Sure.

marbiru
Yeah, definitely, $10 a year I would pay without complaint.
wallflower
I’m not going to read the TOS for the $99 developer subscription, and, assuredly, sharing of accounts like this is probably prohibited.
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soulchild37
If you are a non-profit organization, you can apply for a free developer account : https://developer.apple.com/support/membership-fee-waiver/

I am an iOS/macOS developer myself and have few apps in (Mac) App Store as well, I think the $99/ year serve as a motivation for me to keep on improving my app (to sell more to cover the cost), the $99/yr would probably weed out spammers as well. Try and compare how many spam apps in Play Store vs App Store.

marbiru
thanks! I'm not a non-profit unfortunately, but hopefully that can be helpful for others.

A couple of people have made this Play Store spam-apps comparison but personally I feel like the more relevant differentiator is that Apple seems much more stringent on which apps it accepts (e.g. rejecting "duplicate apps" if someone else has filled the same niche already, which Play doesn't claim to do), rathe rather the $99 charge. That said, I never actually had an issue with spam apps in the Play store -- I'm sure they're out there but my experience as a user is that if I'm looking for X then the top three results are reasonable solutions to X and I'm going to pick one of them, and never get further down in the store. Has your experience been different?