How App Store Pricing Makes Now the Best Time to launch an iOS App for Your Business?

Catering to a premium user base is obviously going to be inexpensive. The apps iOS users download may remain free but the costs that developers and businesses have to bear to create and host these apps on the official App Store can sometimes have a domino effect on the overall project.

Apple does nothing inexpensive. From the hardware to the software, everything that comes from Apple oozes of technical excellence and category leading user interface. This is not to disregard the developers’ community that they have. For the prices they charge, the developers get the best technical support and the best resources to build their apps.

How to Host an App on iOS?

Apple is not an open source platform. The technology they use is proprietary to them and they wish to keep it like that. Because of this, unlike on Android that charges lifetime hosting fees to host an app, developers offering iPhone application development service need to pay annual fees. These fees as things stand are a standard $99 annually. Apart from being able to host an app on the iOS, developers also get various other benefits.

These benefits include larger shares on in-app revenues, app access to hardware & software features like FaceID, Apple Pay, Touch ID etc, beta releases of latest OS versions, APIs and SDKs and exclusive one on one interaction with developers at Apple for any queries.

Latest App Store Pricing

For years Apple maintained the aforementioned program for developers who wished to host an app for iPhone or any other devices running on iOS. In what is claimed by Apple, this is the biggest update on App Store pricing since its launch with over 700 price points. The aim was to make the pricing comprehensive enough for developers. The new pricing tools make it easy for developers to set prices as per the regions and manage foreign exchange better.

Price Points

The new arrangement enables developers to choose from 900 different price points. These are 600 more price points than what the previous arrangement offered. On top of it, an additional 100 price points will be available on a request basis.

Range

The rates start from as low as $0.29 going all the way to $10,000. The elaborated list of price points explains that there are enhanced options to select from that increase incrementally across price ranges. For instance, the selection prices increase every $0.10 up to $10, every $0.50 between $10 and $50 and onwards.

Regions

These prices can be managed across 45 currencies throughout Apple’s 175 storefronts. Furthermore, for each storefront, developers will be able to round off the decimal points that are helpful to manage bundles and yearly plans. Developers will also be able to manage currency and taxes across the storefronts by choosing a base/local storefront to place the pricing for all the remaining ones.

Tools

App Store’s global equalization tools have given a lot of freedom to the developers over the last few years. These tools are further enhanced and offer more flexibility to the developers. For instance, developers can keep their base/local currency constant regardless of the taxation and foreign exchange fluctuations.

Summary

The new features are rolled out and are effective straight away and will continue throughout 2023, confirmed Apple. The new updates are very much developer centric and offer a great insight into how controlling prices can impact the revenues of apps. With Apple’s adamant stance on data tracking and not allowing third party ad servers to control the revenues on iOS apps, these features if managed carefully can make a significant impact on the total app-revenues. The monopoly and total control over the ecosystem comes with a lot of limitations for developers but on the flip side, Apple does everything to make up for the loss.