“This year’s WWDC isn’t just about new operating systems: starting next week and continuing throughout the fall, Apple will begin rolling out new incentives for developers in its App Store, including a new revenue-share model and the introduction of search ads in its iOS App Store,” Lauren Goode reports for The Verge.
“In a rare pre-WWDC sit-down interview with the The Verge, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said that Apple would soon alter its revenue-sharing model for apps,” Goode reports. “While the well-known 70 / 30 split will remain, developers who are able to maintain a subscription with a customer longer than a year will see Apple’s cut drop down to 15 percent. The option to sell subscriptions will also be available to all developers instead of just a few kinds of apps. ‘Now we’re going to open up to all categories,’ Schiller says, ‘and that includes games, which is a huge category.'”
“If the new subscription model becomes widely adopted, it will represent a fundamental shift in the economics of the App Store. Developers will be incentivized to sell their apps for a recurring fee instead of a one-time cost,” Goode reports. “Apple is also going to start showing search ads for apps in its iOS App Store search results for the first time, something the company had previously resisted. ‘We’ve thought about how to carefully do it in a way that, first and foremost, customers will be happy with,’ Schiller says, adding that he believes the ad auction system in App Store search will be ‘fair to developers, and fair for indie developers, too.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Wow! This new subscription model for all apps is going to be a big deal and has already got us thinking of what it might mean for our app and other news apps. Think: Reduced ads or even ad-free (depending on how the numbers crunch out) and/or additional features/functionality for premium versions of apps.
This App Store change by Apple could be a paradigm shift!