Apple adds 700 new price points for apps

In the biggest shake-up to Apple in years, users could have to pay thousands of dollars to download their favourite apps.

Let’s not give Elon Musk any ideas.

This morning Apple announced the biggest shakeup to App Store pricing in years. As of today, developers can now choose to price their apps and in-app purchases as low as 0.39c, to as high as $17,999.99 on request.

This is a big jump from the current most expensive app on the App Store, which is professional piano tuning app CyberTuner, which sells for $1,599.99. Apple anticipates only professional tools will go up to that $17,999.99 number, but in 2008 there was briefly a $999.99USD app called I Am Rich that only gave you an icon of a ruby and did nothing else, so the possibilities are truly endless.

It used to be developers could only price apps with an ending of .99, so the cheapest an app could be (other than free) was 0.99, and no matter how high the full dollar price was, it would still end in .99, as though it was some kind of deal on a shopping channel. That’s changing now, with prices able to go as low as 0.39c, with endings of 0.09, 0.00, 0.90 and 0.95 allowed. This probably isn’t going to make much difference to what you pay, but once you notice that everything currently ends in .99, you really can’t unsee it.

Developers will soon also be able to index the price of apps overseas to the exchange rate of their default currency, so they automatically update as needed – so prepare yourself for American apps to get more expensive as the Australian dollar fluctuates.

If you feel like you’ve been hearing a lot about Apple App Store practices recently, that’s probably because Elon Musk made some claims on Twitter last week. He said that Apple was threatening to remove Twitter from the App Store, Apple had stopped advertising on the platform, that Musk might soon make his own phone to rival the iPhone in retaliation, and that Apple had a “secret” 30% tax on the App Store.

Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

There were some problems with those claims. Firstly, data shows that Apple, Twitter’s largest advertiser, spent $AU124,000 on Twitter ads the day of the tweet.

Secondly, Apple’s 30% commission on app developers that earn over $1million USD from the App Store is not a secret. Epic Games has very publicly sued Apple in multiple countries over these charges and released a 1984-style video about it, and many other companies have spoken out, too. There has been years of media coverage on it. Not knowing about something doesn’t make it secret. Also, smaller developers pay a 15% fee instead, and subscriptions that roll over drop to 15% after the first year (and, presumably, it’s the subscription pricing that has Musk concerned for his plans to offer $8 blue ticks).

Thirdly, Musk admitted after meeting Apple CEO Tim Cook at Apple headquarters that Apple had no plans to remove Twitter from the App Store.

Good conversation. Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 30, 2022

However, it would not be surprising if Apple did at some point remove Twitter from the App Store, albeit temporarily. Musk has gutted the content moderation teams at Twitter, and Apple is quite famously pro-content moderation. In 2021 Discord was forced to block NSFW servers in the iOS app (later allowing them to become opt-in). Also last year, Tumblr was briefly removed from the App Store entirely until a variety of tags were blocked on the iOS app. These tags ranged from the not-unexpected penis, cocaine and gore, to the outright weird girl, single dad, transphobia, me, Eugene Levy, queue, bald, tagged and testicular cancer.

Given that Kanye West posted a Swastika in a Star of David on Twitter the day after Musk’s conversation with Cook (the same day Musk welcomed back accounts of previously banned neo-Nazis), many commentators think the conversations around Twitter’s inclusion on the App Store are ongoing.

The good news for Musk, though, is that when he does decide to relaunch the $8 subscription, he can price it at $8.00 instead of $7.99. It’s the little things.