It’s awesome to see more price decreases … before the government dismantles our industry.
Kudos to our app store partners for another round of price cuts! While most devs are less fixated on app store fee formulas and more on the services and tools they offer, falling fees are always a welcome surprise. Apple and Google are now taking turns sweetening their deals and fine-tuning what and how apps are treated based on evolving app monetization schemes. We’ll leave it to Google to give the details – see their blog post for more – but this is another clear sign that platforms recognize that developer success is their success too.
For years, app store competition has focused on the “supply-side”; trying to build the best tools, offer the best community experience, engage better or address store mechanics and add new features. More importantly, the underlying platforms are competing for consumers, and that means a growing demand for new features and the apps that capitalize on them. This was exactly what devs needed in a growing industry. Fees have been less of a focus – mostly because those developers most impacted are highly lucrative and successful franchises themselves. This latest round of fee cuts opens up many new monetization strategies and makes it easier for those on the cusp of success to breakthrough. Nothing but good news there!
No good deed goes unpunished, however, and for some billionaire developers nothing will ever be enough. The Epic Games litigation has now spawned a wave of bad legislative proposals, all designed to scorch the earth under Google and Apple’s feet. Unfortunately, that’s the ground we all live on.
We’ll have much more to say about the threat to app stores in the weeks ahead, so if your livelihood relies on the existence of today’s ecosystems, we encourage you to celebrate this windfall, stay connected, and lend us your voice for the battles to come.
