Apple is finally allowing developers to sell their apps to other developers | Hacker News Reader

Apple is finally allowing developers to sell their apps to other developers

venturebeat.com

152 pointsrmah28 comments

This deceptively little tidbit of change is probably the most important news on frontpage right now.

Arrrgh! Sorry - I impulsively down-voted you out of sheer bewilderment that anyone could possibly think that selling an app is more important than a systematic and widespread government invasion of civilian privacy. But your comment is not (necessarily) a troll, just different to my opinion - so I should have just replied saying so instead of disagreeing via rage-downvote.

That's fine. I've expected polarized oppinions on this.

I just think about it in terms of actionable changes and money flux in startup world, so it is very important to me. It's a maker-or-breaker-of-app-stores kind of change.

My strategy is to just read news on Fridays. If anythings important someone will let me know during the week.

Until then I try to only look at stories that aren't 24 hour news cycle stuff. And this one is actually a useful thing for an ios developer to know.

impulsively down-voted you out of sheer bewilderment that anyone could possibly think that selling an app is more important than a systematic and widespread government invasion of civilian privacy

But not every story about PRISM is important or even telling us anything new. Reflexively upvoting any story that has to do with the government being "bad" is just going to fill the front page with a lot of repeated info (at best) and speculative nonsense (at worst).

...and this neatly explains the "all politics, all the time" nature of HN for the past week. :/

At this point in the cycle, most of what you're referring to isn't news. The front page has a lot of analysis of Prism etc, but relatively little news, at the moment.

This announcement may not be the most important topic on the front page, but the parent comment never implied that it was.

Seriously one or two stories with _actual details_ so that we can find out what is going on is fine.

Hijacking the front page: not so much.

Apple allowing you to sell your own IP and business is great news indeed and should be celebrated.

This is great. I have a single free app I have no interest in updating, but which I am forced to pay apple £60/year to keep on the store, both for new and old users. Now I can 'park' it with a friend still involved in iOS development.

I did an app transfer yesterday and it was a shockingly smooth & painless process. The system updated in just a couple of hours.

Do the users get some sort of notification of the change, or is the only difference to them the "made by" label in the App Store?

As far as I can tell, the only thing the users will notice is a change in name of the Seller in the app store listing if they care to notice; there is no active notification to users. The copyright info and date last updated remain the same.

I'm curious what people think of existing marketplaces.

If you're thinking of selling an app, do you feel like the tools are there to find buyers and perform the transaction?

Easy app transfer is potentially a huge secondary market for app developers and the market for "app flipping" could become a very lucrative opportunity for devs.

How so? What profits could a flipper look forward to?

In other words, does "app flipping" exist in the Android space (which, given the lack of restrictions, would allow/encourage this)?

Well there is money to be made on either side. You, could as a dev get good at at building apps quick and turning around and selling them at some potential revenue multiple. As a buyer, you might be able to buy something cheap that pays for itself over some short period of time if maybe you are decent at marketing or something.

I think it exists in both iOS and Android. I haven't looked into it enough to see which is more valuable, but the possibilities are there.

You could always sell your app, I had to do this a number of times, when I was working on apps for other companies. It just involved a few emails in the past.

Did each app have its own developer account? I think the hard part was if you had three apps and wanted to move one to a different developer.

The idea that this is Apple's business whether to allow shows the whole thing to be corrupt.

This title is not accurate. You could always sell your code and assets but you would have to recompile and resubmit whereas now it stays live through the transfer.

Depends on what you consider to be the "app". The procedure you describe means the app gets a new name, a new bundle ID, means that no existing purchasers get a copy of the newly submitted app, no automatic upgrades, user settings are not migrated, no reviews transfer over, etc.

Yes, this is definitely better for the users as well as the developers.

You've been able to do this for awhile now. NOW you don't need Apple's help though to do it.

Isn't the whole benefit the point that you keep the userbase? They've essentially allowed devs to sell their list of users along with their app.

And they get a % cut of transfer sale amount, just like 30 or 33% or so of all app purchases by end users?

They've given up on thinking the iPhone is something special. Rightfully so.

Right, I'm sure that's how the decision making process went.

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