Apple Slices Developer App Store Fees To Half For Many Developers

The US computer company Apple today announced a reduction in fees for the sale of apps via its App Store for iOS, which could be good news at least for all developers with lower sales. Nevertheless, the criticism continues.

As Apple announced today, the so-called App Store Small Business Program will be launched in early 2021. Among other things, this includes a reduced fee for the sale of apps via the official Apple store, so that instead of the usual 30 percent, only 15 percent of the sales price and all in-app sales are retained by Apple.

Apple is generous, but is only in a few cases

However, the whole thing is tied to a number of conditions that limit the program to small developers. A developer can only benefit from the reduced fee if all his apps generate a maximum of one million dollars in sales via the App Store in one year. For this purpose, Apple is evaluating the developer’s sales statistics for 2020 in order to then grant the aforementioned discount on its fee in 2021.

However, Apple does not simply give all developers who have turned over less than a million dollars the option to benefit from reduced fees. Instead, you choose the developers by hand. On top of that, the levy immediately rises to 30 percent of sales as soon as a developer can generate a million dollars in the next year. Apple’s big announcement will ultimately only benefit a limited number of developers for the time being. The company probably wants to react to the pressure of the competition authorities worldwide, which Apple has been accusing of some time of massively abusing its dominant position as the sole provider of an app store and above all as the sole processor of payments in and for apps on iOS and thus a monopoly having formed.

The criticism of some developers was correspondingly loud shortly after the announcement of the App Store Small Business program was published. On Twitter, the inventor of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, loudly vented his anger and accused Apple of starting a largely ineffective PR campaign with the program, while the developers continue to be cupped as a monopoly.