You must be mad a lot. This is how the world works and Apple is nothing to single out here.
The world has worked in many different ways before, and will work in different ways in the future. Let's have a discussion about how we'd like to see it work, ya?
It's broken, and the government is going to slap the shit out of Apple.
The App Store eats away more profit than taxes, and is single handedly responsible for teaching the public that an eternity of app updates are for free. They drove the public to expect apps should be cheaper than coffee.
While still continuing to charge the developer 99USD a year.
My recollection was that if anyone taught this to the public it was the press and the blogosphere.
This argument was had at the time, and review sites vilified anything that wasn’t $1 as greed.
Can you say what Apple did that contributed to this?
* iOS upgrades were free and macOS upgrades turned free a few years after the iOS App Store became available * the lower price tiers available for app developers started with 0 and $1, and in steps of $1 * for many years, the iOS App Store free and paid charts were huge drivers for downloads. It was worth making an app much cheaper and making it up in volume. That strategy worked for many years.
Apple cultivated that environment and developers lived it
That is where the idea that software should be free or cheap came from.
As for ‘allowing’ one dollar apps. It seems like you are proposing that Apple should be punished for not entering into a price fixing arrangement to artificially inflate software prices.
I have some sympathy for wishing they had done this, but this is exactly what they tried with books, and they were subjected to antitrust action.
Keeping prices artificially high is illegal - you can’t blame Apple for not doing it.
Making software free or cheap was already a fait accompli, thanks to the web and VC funded startups.
Apple actually reversed that partially by creating a store that was trustworthy enough for people to spend some money on software again.
It is simply not true that Apple caused the race to the bottom. Look back at media from the time and you can confirm this.
There is always downward pressure on prices because well-funded startups can provide their product free. But charts and the emphasis on them were very very unhealthy. I don’t think Apple can ever fix it now.
This is a serious problem for the entire consumer and prosumer industry. While competition that drives prices down is often good, but past a certain limit and it can do long term harm to the industry that is irreversible. I fear we might have already crossed that threshold.
I just don’t think that Apple could have done much about it at the beginning. If they weren’t producing charts, someone else would have been because people want to know what other people think is good, and on a global scale this results in winner takes all dynamics.
I agree with you about everything in this comment except the sentiment that it’s Apple’s fault or that they could have done something about it from the start.
My view is that we actually now do have a chance to do something about it, but anti-trust action against Apple will almost certainly destroy that chance and leave us stuck with this situation for much longer.
And they were one of the very few companies that could have done something.
They saw it happening and they chose to not intervene.
And a clear violation of anti-trust law.
I don't understand - did Apple set app prices? Or did the app developers?
Now, contrary to econ 101 thought experiments, you don't always want to approach the ideal of perfectly-competitive marketplaces too closely. It can be bad for overall market health and even, ultimately, harm choices available to consumers for exactly the reasons cited.
[EDIT] actually it could also indicate that they've done one part of market-creation really poorly, which is that they're making reliable information other than price way too hard to discover, though again, that the market has not just survived this defect/cost but thrived indicates they did an uncommonly good job at other parts.
I doubt it. Apple would get out it like they got out of their European Tax-ish.
"It is what it is"