Most of the following was in response to the blog article by Layton Duncan of Polar Bear Farm.
iPhone developers were happy to see the AppStore come to life as it gave us a official way to release our app to the world. Little did we know that people would freak out about having to pay even $1 for apps, when before the App Store we were selling to the Jailbrake community for $10 or so, without complaint.
The $1 app issue is unfortunately not one that I think Apple can fix, as it’s not them causing it. It’s the consumers. Consumers seem to have it in their head that it is ok to pay $5, $10, $20 and up, for desktop applications, but that an iPhone app for some reason shouldn’t cost more then $1. Maybe they are stuck in the mind frame of old school cellphone apps/games that were absolute crap and not worth more then $1 (if even that), or if they just don’t understand what it really takes to make a beautiful, stable iPhone application.
Personally I think it is a combination of those 2 and that when the app store opened people were not sure what to charge, and some of the bigger name companies came to the AppStore with free and low price apps, and this set the consumers in a mind frame that free or almost free is what is expected. Who knows, maybe they are just cheap. The only way around this that I can see is for all or at least a large amount of developers to “ban together” and start charging a fair (to both sides) price.
No doubt it will hurt sells at first but perhaps we can get passed the misguided mentality.
