Fee Waivers for Apple Developer Program Now Available for Government, Nonprofit Organizations and Educational Institutions

[MacRumors]

Apple today announced the official availability of fee waivers for its Apple Developer Program for nonprofit organizations, accredited educational institutions, and government entities in the United States who plan to distribute free apps on the App Store.

Qualified organizations are able to apply for the waiver, which will provide a free annual membership to the Developer Program. Apple normally charges developers $99 per year.

Apple's plan to offer free developer memberships to government and nonprofit apps in the United States was first highlighted in late December when its App Store guidelines were updated.

Apple's new Membership Fee Waiver webpage includes details on which organizations are eligible for the discount. Requirements include a EIN/Tax ID number, a D-U-N-S number, and legal entity status. Apple will review each fee waiver request.

Entities that receive the fee waiver may not publish paid apps or apps with in-app purchases, and members of the Apple Developer Enterprise Program are not eligible. The program is also not available to individuals and sole proprietors/single person businesses.

Fee waivers are currently limited to the United States, but Apple says waivers will be added for other countries "as they become available."

Article Link: Fee Waivers for Apple Developer Program Now Available for Government, Nonprofit Organizations and Educational Institutions

 

[FelixDerKater]

Apple is changing.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

Why all this legal mess? Make it free to distribute free apps, end of story.

 

[Cosmosent]

NOT that Apple will act on it, but I sent an email to Tim Cook yesterday, requesting that Developers be allowed to sell their iOS apps off their own website ... even said that I'd be OK if Apple took a 15% cut if they handled all of the financial transactions.

Such a move would significantly help App Developer companies with Unique & Innovative apps.

As many know, the iOS App Store is now almost strictly "curated," AND that Apple / Tim Cook has had, and continues to have, a complete Stranglehold on App Discovery.

--> Offering "Independence" from their iOS App Store would be the single-best thing Apple could do for their Developer community. <--

Apple's recent attempts to try to Prop-up the App Store, such as Pre-Orders, which basically ONLY applies to Games, and the expansion of Search Ads, which in general is a very stupid thing, won't save the iOS App Store.

The ONLY way the iOS App Store gets fixed is if the significance of Ratings are directly tied to Usage ... if a User rated the app, but then hasn't used it for 30 days, that rating disappears from the Rankings algorithm.

That would clean-up the Rankings mess in a heart beat, but for whatever reason, Apple either can't, or won't, fix it.

 

[Kapangas]

--> Offering "Independence" from their iOS App Store would be the single-best thing Apple could do for their Developer community. <--

No.

 

[LogicalApex]

--> Offering "Independence" from their iOS App Store would be the single-best thing Apple could do for their Developer community. <--

What do you mean by this? That Apple would allow you to "sideload" apps in a manner similar to macOS or Windows where you can purchase, download, and install the app without any interaction with the "App Store"?

If they were to go this route... How would they be able to vet the applications in any way? Not saying that their vetting is perfect...

 

[chrono1081]

Good! Hopefully this takes care of one of the enormous hassles of dealing with tax exempt purchases with Apple. It would be great if you could just register your account as tax exempt and use a credit card to pay but that's not the case, what happens is you spend forever on the phone with them getting bounced back and forth until someone who is a manager takes the call and gets the purchase sorted out.

Why all this legal mess? Make it free to distribute free apps, end of story.

Unfortunately this doesn't work well, this is how you end up like the Play store with tons of shovelware.

Although the Apple app store isn't free from shovelware, its a lot less prevalent. The $99 is a deterrent.

 

[kasakka]

How about waiving the stupid fee for individuals who develop non-commercial apps? $99 is a lot if you just want to make an app for iOS that only you use.

 

[jonblatho]

Why all this legal mess? Make it free to distribute free apps, end of story.

Facebook and Twitter are free apps without in-app purchases. Should they not have to pay the $99/year despite making immense money off of those apps?

Also: If an eligible organization is big enough to consider putting its own app on the App Store, this “legal mess” is trivial. They should already have an EIN and legal entity status, and it’s highly likely that they also already have a D-U-N-S number. If not, it’s easy to get. Boom, requirements satisfied.

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

Why all this legal mess? Make it free to distribute free apps, end of story.

No thanks. Then you end up with so much garbage that it'd take months to get your app approved.

Legit developers are just fine paying $99 a year for what they get in return. We make it back in minutes.

 

[Vjosullivan]

Facebook and Twitter are free apps without in-app purchases. Should they not have to pay the $99/year despite making immense money off of those apps?

Apple have already sold you the hardware and the operating system. The reason you bought them was to run the applications like Facebook and Twitter (and everything else). So, Apple are already profiting directly from free software.

 

[jonblatho]

Apple have already sold you the hardware and the operating system. The reason you bought them was to run the applications like Facebook and Twitter (and everything else). So, Apple are already profiting directly from free software.

Next time you go to see an accountant, please tell them exactly what you told me.

 

[chrono1081]

How about waiving the stupid fee for individuals who develop non-commercial apps? $99 is a lot if you just want to make an app for iOS that only you use.

You've been able to do this for years now. Tim Cook announced it in I think 2013 or 2014 that you no longer had to pay for a developer account if you were just learning and were uploading to your own device.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

Facebook and Twitter are free apps without in-app purchases. Should they not have to pay the $99/year despite making immense money off of those apps?

That's actually a fantastic example of why the flat $99/year is so absurd. Apple charges the developers making several $B annually the same exact amount that they charge everyone else, even though Apple has to spend a lot more on bandwidth for people downloading Facebook than they do for an app that gets a few downloads per year.

But yeah. As another developer said earlier, the biggest issue with apps on iOS is the fact they have to come from the app store. Why can't it be handled the same way as on Mac OS?

How many apps does anyone use on their Mac that came from the Mac App Store vs from Steam or another store or a totally independent website? For iOS devices to become my primary computers, they're going to have to actually be as flexible as my computer. Part of my computer's flexibility comes from the fact that I can download and run whatever niche software I want, whether Apple approved it or not.

 

[LogicalApex]

That's actually a fantastic example of why the flat $99/year is so absurd. Apple charges the developers making several $B annually the same exact amount that they charge everyone else, even though Apple has to spend a lot more on bandwidth for people downloading Facebook than they do for an app that gets a few downloads per year.

But yeah. As another developer said earlier, the biggest issue with apps on iOS is the fact they have to come from the app store. Why can't it be handled the same way as on Mac OS?

How many apps does anyone use on their Mac that came from the Mac App Store vs from Steam or another store or a totally independent website? For iOS devices to become my primary computers, they're going to have to actually be as flexible as my computer. Part of my computer's flexibility comes from the fact that I can download and run whatever niche software I want, whether Apple approved it or not.

Facebook isn't a great example here, but developers would likely make the argument that Apple's fee structure being two part helps to balance this reality out. The $99 fixed fee is the same no matter how little or how many apps a developer creates. So an indy developer with 50 apps pays the same $99 as does LastPass with 1, but the 15% (or whatever it is) revenue cut that Apple makes will be borne more by larger and more successful developers. For very large developers like Adobe they could likely get those numbers down to 1% or 2% due to their size giving them negotiating power with payment processors if they were able to sell outside of the iOS store.

So the developer fee is only 1 part of the larger story... No plan they come up with would be perfect for both groups.

The mac app store isn't working for the same reason the Windows Store isn't working... The Desktop has an established method of interacting with its Eco System. They would get more traction banning all but the app store there, but that wouldn't fly due to the large amount of ecosystem development around the existing model. So it is a lot easier to have this locked approach from the start as you have with iOS.

Both have their own warts... You don't need to fight with serial numbers and activation limits and servers on iOS due to the App Store sorting this out for you as a consumer. From a developer perspective you lose a lot of creative licensing schemes which can suck. But you also gain lower piracy rates as a trade off.

 

[musehcl74]

Facebook and Twitter are free apps without in-app purchases. Should they not have to pay the $99/year despite making immense money off of those apps?

Also: If an eligible organization is big enough to consider putting its own app on the App Store, this “legal mess” is trivial. They should already have an EIN and legal entity status, and it’s highly likely that they also already have a D-U-N-S number. If not, it’s easy to get. Boom, requirements satisfied.

I am sure you know the issue does not lie where you pretend it does. A quick example: I am an avid fpv drone builder/flier. I recently bought a usb fpv receiver from Eachine. There are a whole slew of apps to run that particular hardware in the play store. However, none in the apple app store. Therein lies the issue. I don't want to spend $1000+ on an iphone X only to be restricted in how I use MY device. The default choice for me in this case would be an android based phone. I hope you understand the frustrations of us the non-sheeple when it comes to apple devices.

 

[jonblatho]

I am sure you know the issue does not lie where you pretend it does. A quick example: I am an avid fpv drone builder/flier. I recently bought a usb fpv receiver from Eachine. There are a whole slew of apps to run that particular hardware in the play store. However, none in the apple app store. Therein lies the issue. I don't want to spend $1000+ on an iphone X only to be restricted in how I use MY device. The default choice for me in this case would be an android based phone. I hope you understand the frustrations of us the non-sheeple when it comes to apple devices.

You revived a thread that had been dead for nearly 6 months by discussing an “issue” that wasn’t even at hand, to my knowledge, at any point in the thread, which was about fee waivers to join the Apple Developer Program for certain government/nonprofit/educational organizations.

Nonetheless, if you need an Android phone to work with some hardware, then buy an Android phone. Apple does just fine either way. It’s that simple.

 

[musehcl74]

The issue of free waivers raised another issue regarding apple charging a fee to devs for non commercial apps. According to you, they should. My while point is that they shouldn't. I think they should do what the play store does maybe with an app vetting process. Yeah and it wouldn't take months to get your app through. It is not like people are trying to publish hundreds of thousands of apps per month anyway.
[doublepost=1530070290][/doublepost]Apple has created a drought of apps in the app store. I landed on this thread when a friend contacted me saying that he was no longer supporting an app on the app store because apple had raised the annual fee by $50. I quickly did a Google search to see if there was any news about this only to land on this article.