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Comment by kyriakos | Hacker News Reader

1.49 is there to ensure no crappy apps. after all in case of MS trials are possible meaning you no longer need to buy crappy apps just because the description sounds good.

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I don't have any particular problems with the 1.49 price point (and I kind of wish the iOS app store hadn't set a standard where a $2 or $3 app is considered "expensive"), but how does an extra $.50 prevent crappy apps?

It doesn't prevent them of course, but the higher price floor and the lower cut incentive for >$25k seem to both be designed to encourage devs to focus on high-quality apps rather than flood the store with a lot of crappy ones. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there will be tons of crappy apps anyway, but hopefully a slightly better signal-to-noise ratio overall.

$1.49 is an awkward price, because it involves fractional dollars, and unwelcome mental calculations. The jump from $1.49 to $1.99 is easy to make, because $1.99 is way more attractive (how many $1.49 apps are there in the iOS app store?). From there, $1.99 to $2.99 is also easy, still only a 50% increase. Suddenly -POOF- you have a whole array of apps priced around 2-3-4 dollars, instead of a $.99 bloc. This raises the price floor of apps on the Windows market, and there are a multitude of studies describing how effective price anchoring can be.

One nit: There are exactly 0 apps on the iOS App Store priced $1.49, because it isn't possible to price an app at that amount (it goes up in increments of $1).

That said, I agree with you - I hope it successfully makes apps in the $2-$10 range more popular, which means developers can invest more time in them and make them better.

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