What is the average price of apps in the apps store?
Maybe we’ll see non-subscription pricing where developers can charge for version updates.
But I don’t see how there will be any benefit “from the competitive pressure on Apple’s pricing.”
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If Apple is charging devs a 20% commission on the apps and subscriptions you buy, devs should be able to offer apps to you for less in an alternative App Store that charges 5% or by making them available for direct download with no commission. Some developers with extremely desirable software could even refuse to sell through Apple’s store unless they lowered their commissions. All that would put downward pressure on Apple’s pricing.
We’d also be able to get types of apps that Apple arbitrarily keeps out of the App Store, like WiFi analyzers, which are perfectly legitimate and useful tools.
I don’t understand why some of the Mac owners here are worried about having the same freedom on their iPhones and iPads that they currently have on their Macs.
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True, but nothing to do with pricing.
And I’m all for having a more Mac like iOS software marketplace (see my previous posts in this thread). But given the race to the bottom with app pricing I doubt there will be much benefit to consumers (prices are already low, perhaps too low for sustained development (see note 1)). So while Apple’s cut may go down, I would be very surprised if any of those savings will see their way to users.
Note 1: @alinp32 has written a nice summary of the economics, Costs of running a macOS app studio business. And this is for macOS software, where prices skew higher than iOS.
Yes, but it’s another negative consequence of Apple’s monopoly over iOS and iPadOS app distribution.
I guess we’ll see what the medium and long-term effects are of opening up that market (assuming the current antitrust efforts are successful), but basic economics and history show that in the absence of collusion and price fixing (which are illegal), competition tends to drive down pricing.
There’s a floor due to cost of production, of course, but even then competition creates incentives to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of production.
And Apple’s 20% toll vastly exceeds its cost of production for providing app review and distribution. It gets away with it because it holds a monopoly over app distribution to nearly 60% of the smartphones in the US.
Of course, even during the robber baron era, there were ceilings to how much monopolies could charge, because they couldn’t charge more than buyers could or would pay before they’d do without. But prices were still significantly higher than under competitive conditions.
Commercial desktop apps do tend to cost more than smartphone apps, largely because their cost of production usually has to be amortized across a smaller base of customers.
Agreed. I suspect that if there’s a reduction in fees for Developers, many will not pass the change onto customers, unless they inflated the price to take the App Store into
Account before.
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And I’m not sure how much it will go down, unless devs start trying to “poison pill” by pricing substantially lower in other stores just for the sake of doing so.
I realize that 20-30% is non-trivial, but it wouldn’t shock me if the floor (assuming that other app stores would get into this business to actually make money) is at least 10%. Credit card processing, delivery infrastructure, customer service, etc. all eat up money. And the more competing app stores that pop up, the less each individual app store would be able to spread around some of the fixed costs.
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Buying from a cut-rate App Store would make me wonder where they are cutting corners, what infrastructure is being neglected? Kind of like flying with a cut-rate airline, although falling out of the sky would not be nearly as much of a consideration. 
I think that there’s a big piece of info we don’t know here though, and that’s what a “standard” non-monopoly app store should look like, charge, etc.
This reminds me of Internet domain names back in the day. There were companies that would charge hundreds of dollars for you to reserve a domain name. Then it dropped to more like $30 as the “reasonable” rate. Now the main TLDs are more in the neighborhood of $15 to $20. And the majority of those $15-$20 providers are meaningfully “cut-rate” IMHO.
But like domains, I think there’s also the concern about who’s getting the money, continuity, etc.
If I pay $80 for Omnifocus to “Frank’s App Store,” and Frank’s App Store shutters their business, where’s my license? With Omnigroup? With Frank’s App Store? Can I download the app later after Frank shuts down his store? Do I have to re-buy from another app store?
The solution for domains probably won’t work here. But it’s an interesting thing to think about - especially given the (IMHO) high likelihood that somebody will try to be “the cheapest,” and will disappear when they discover their model is flawed.
Sideloading might well predominate over alternative app stores on iOS/iPadOS as it always has on macOS, with direct downloads from the developers becoming common.
But there’s a stronger mindset to use app stores on mobile devices than on desktop operating systems (leaving aside package managers on Linux), so more alternative app stores may emerge for iOS. Microsoft might well open one, for example.
Setapp is an alternative app store for macOS with a very different business model from most other app stores, and we might well see more things like that happening on iOS, starting with Setapp itself. They already have an add-on subscription for iOS apps, but afaik they’re currently just companions to the Mac apps they offer and can only be installed through the App Store.
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What do you think about buying direct from the developer? They could sell merchandise on a squarespace site for less than $50/month.
Fine on my Mac with the right context and reputation but not on my iPhone. You’re the guy with the stats. How many more iPhones are sold and in use than Macs? That and the mobile nature of our phones makes the attack surface much greater for phones. Isn’t the background and experience level of a typical Mac owner much higher than that of a typical iPhone user? Mac newbies just use the built-in Mac apps or buy from the Mac App Store, not from some dev on some web site.
As I’ve mentioned before, I think the Mac Gatekeeper model (install from App Store and known developers) would work for our iPhones and iPads. I wouldn’t think twice about installing apps from, for example, Barebones or the OmniGroup.
Third party apps stores are coming to the EU, and eventually to the US, etc. I’m sure Apple is working to make that as safe as possible.
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Well, of course. I don’t follow Android news so I only occasionally hear about the problems over there. But you can bet that if there is a failure with a third-party app store or alternate payment method on an iPhone, that it would get big play in the media. And I wonder who would get blamed?
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We can discuss what may or may not happen when iOS/iPadOS users gain access to third party apps/app stores, or we can wait and see. I’ll adapt like I always have.
If there were no applications available for consumers to add to their iPhones, would anyone buy an iPhone and be happy with just those apps that are supplied by Apple? Of course some would, but it is certainly to Apple’s advantage that developers create applications we want to use, increasing the likelihood we’ll continue to buy the device. The price we pay for an app is presumably acceptable to us else we wouldn’t pay it, then everyone loses. That Apple takes a cut for providing the infrastructure on which the developer can offer their wares seems reasonable, in the same way that it seems reasonable to pay to sell at a car boot or table top sale. But 30% is a lot for the privilege of offering something for sale, and with no other car boot or table top sales available the developer is forced to use that one outlet. Apple win when there exist 3rd party apps for people to use on the iPhone. They really ought to lower that percentage. It just does not seem reasonable to me.
But in your analogy one “car boot” or “table top sales” is pretty much the same as any other, hawking whatever cheap goods would be offered in those venues. Apple products are unique, highly valued, and would not exist without Apple’s unique platform. 30% is a lot? Developers and consumers have accepted these circumstances for many years now as there is nothing else like an Apple product. And if you don’t believe that, you simply buy something else. Lots of people have done that, too.
How would the attack surface be greater on your iPhone than on your Mac? I’m assuming you’d take the same care about installing apps on your iPhone as you do on your Mac.
If you want to be extra careful, you could continue to install apps only from the official App Store, just as you do now.
And if you did want to wander farther afield, you could still only install apps from known and respected developers as you probably do in your Mac
If you look at the names and claimed functionalities of Android apps that turn out to be malware, they’re almost always very obviously sketchy, and affect only a vanishingly small proportion of Android users, at worst a few thousand downloads out of over three billion active users of the OS.
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Some podcasters talking about CES this week said something about today’s televisions being “big Android tablets that you hang on the wall”. I hadn’t thought about it before, but that is one way to describe them 
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