Paid Upgrades

Paid upgrades in Apple’s App Stores has been a topic of some debate since the App Stores launched. Wil Shipley stoked the fires back in March, arguing that the Mac App Store needs paid upgrades:

Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store face a lose/lose choice: either provide all major upgrades to existing customers for free (thus losing a quarter of our revenue), or create a “new” product for each major version (creating customer confusion) and charge existing customers full price again (creating customer anger).

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Ita

My friend Ben Lachman (@blach) has started a new venture called Nice Mohawk and they released their first iOS app yesterday: Ita. Ita is a universal, Retina-ready list-making app that syncs across all your devices with iCloud.

It’s available at an introductory price of 99¢ for the next two weeks. I’ve been beta testing it for the last couple of weeks and it is a beautifully designed and finely polished app.

The iOS In-App Purchases Requirement

Marco Arment lays out the arguments against Apple’s new in-app purchase requirements for iOS apps:

This is partially defensible: Apple’s promotions in the App Store certainly bring a lot of people to apps, and it’s all happening on their hardware and platform. But if someone wants the Wall Street Journal app and finds it by searching for “WSJ” in the App Store and selecting it directly, who really brought that customer to the app?

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Apple Isn’t Earning Their 30%

Much has been said over the last 2½ years about the App Store and places where Apple is failing third-party developers. Many things have been fixed, but unfortunately, many more have been neglected or only partially addressed. On January 22, 2011, the App Store surpassed 10 billion downloads. Let’s assume 1% of those are paid and Apple only takes the minimum 29¢ for each one. That’s still $29 million. Apple needs to do a lot more to earn their 30% cut. Read More