I agree. The $20 Apps were worth the money and I'm sure the new 2.0 features will be worth the money too. By the way, don't we all pay every time a new Mac OS X comes out?
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Apple Releases iPhone SDK, Demos Spore, Instant Messaging
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I agree. The $20 Apps were worth the money and I'm sure the new 2.0 features will be worth the money too. By the way, don't we all pay every time a new Mac OS X comes out?
I think we're beginning to see which people don't or which people don't want too. Either way they can't see a great offer in front of them.
So it is revenue replacement then?
Not that it matters, it's still cheap.
Anyway, the commercial deal for the apps is pretty good. A $99 annual fee and a 30% cut aren't bad if you consider marketing and distributon costs plus the global audience iTunes has.
Why would anybody want porn app when you already have access to all the porn sites through Safari?
Microsft Developer's Network subscription which comes with all the OSs and SDKs costs thousands of dollars a year. Their .NET development toolset costs hundreds of dollars per license. But of course it would cost you nothing if you pirate the software.
I dont know why everyone is moaning about the $99 per year. That fee to subscribe the apple developer program has always been there, and will continue to into the future. Also everyone seems to be over valuing $99. If you can afford an iPhone, a Mac to develop on, the spair time to develop the application. You can afford to pay $99, if you cant afford $99 get a job. Seiously $99 is not very much money at all. It might be to a 12 year old but those with life expeience should know that $99 is not a dealbreaker especially when your potentially buying a massive revenue stream if you come up with an idea.
If i decided to take up coding for the iphone for a hobby and wrote a app i would be considered a "beedroom coder", if i decided i liked it and published it on itunes and only 100 people downloaded it id have a big smile on my face. Honestly thats worth paying $99 for, iv spent many times more cash on nothing i can justify spending $99 on getting somthing published. I mean i could rather easily blow $99 on one night out.
If i decided to take up coding for the iphone for a hobby and wrote a app i would be considered a "beedroom coder", if i decided i liked it and published it on itunes and only 100 people downloaded it id have a big smile on my face. Honestly thats worth paying $99 for, iv spent many times more cash on nothing i can justify spending $99 on getting somthing published. I mean i could rather easily blow $99 on one night out.
Yeah right on. One thing though, which is that this iTune distribution model is going to level the playing field for everybody from the big boys to the little 13 year olds so your app would probably have to be really butt-kicking. So good luck!
Really. You pay for shelf space, either in the real world or in the virtual world. And you pay the distributor, either in the real world or in the virtual world; sometimes it's just 9%, sometimes it's 40-50% (using figures quote in this thread for electronic distribution).
Those are NOT cutting into "profit"; that's a standard cost of doing business.
- AOL AIM (instant messaging client)
Native iPhone apps will be distributed through the iTunes App Store, with wireless downloads. Developers pick the price, and get 70% of revenue. The 70% will be paid out to developers monthly, and there are no other fees. The iTunes App Store will handle over the air updates to your applications. Developers of free applications will not be charged for Apple to deliver their applications through iTunes.
All this will come with the iPhone 2.0 update, in beta today going to thousands of developers. Customers will get it in June as a free software update to iPhone users. Meanwhile, iPod Touch users will be charged a small fee due to accounting issues.
Article Link
1- Great that they allow developers to set their own price. hope this is real, at itunes in music they barely allow that. they have very rigid pricing limits, which keep individual song pricing the same no matter what.
2- The accounting fee Apple is charging for the software updates is BS. No government would ever challenge apple on this. it is so apparant Apple is cheap! They want to charge for every lil upgrade they can. If you have 500,000 people paying for a $2 or $5 upgrade, that amounts to between One Million dollars and 2.5 million dollars. which is income or serves to subsidize development. which adds up and honestly is crazy for a massively popular company to charge.
if they wanted to they could charge .01 cents. it isnt a govt accounting issue. it's the money they want.
So do not buy an iPod Touch at this point. Apple has the courtesy to let you know way ahead of time that it will charge for the upgrade so you can make your own purchasing decision and you still whine.
It probably has to do with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which has made it very particular for companies to account for revenue/expense. Simply put, you cannot tell the government that you're making however much you're making for selling a certain good and then start giving out freebie to reduce your taxes - you either have to tell the government right from the get go you are not making that much to begin with and spread out the revenue over say 2 years like with the iPhone, or you tell the government you will collect more money down the road like with the iPod Touch. Doing anything different and the SEC and the IRS will be on your case so fast it will make your head spin.
iTune store is free
That is called big government with the big accounting rules. Just vote Republicans for smaller government.
Tell me one, just one free software repository on earth that
1. does not contain malware or viruses, guaranteed
2. does not ask for my email address
3. does not show me bannar ad
4. always has the latest versions
5. does not charge me money
6. does not impose download limit
7. does not throttle your throughput
8. has everything, and I mean absolutely every free application on earth so I don't have to jump from site to site
Until such a site exists, the sad state of affair is that if the developer doesn't pay, the users would. Somebody always pays. This is life, get with the program. Even air isn't free with all these talks about global warming.
And what is to pay for the people who review the apps? Do they not need to eat?
See free site comment above. Or else I am all for full control of distribution because the day when Symantec needs to develop Internet Security bloatware for the iPhone then Apple has truly failed.
What is wrong with that? That is what drives innovation. Don't be so jealous or bitter, you too can found the next Google or Facebook.
This is a free market. I am sure if people are really fed up they would go some place else.
It will never happen. Linux will never become mainstream. It is too hard. If it is not so hard there would not be companies who give it away free just so they can sell you their expensive support contracts when nobody in house is able to figure it out. Linux is black magic. But of course you can't whine because you would be accused of "complainting about free foods".
I am sure Apple has many highly qualified attorneys who have been consulted on this. You don't know what Apple's agreement with their carrarier is. Perhaps the agreement mandates that Apple has 100% control over distribution so to control the use of bandwidth over their network. Who knows. If it's gonna be a court cast it's gonna be a court case. In this country the lawyers are really the ones who in aggregate make all the money anyway.
Most of the problem of the computing world is the wild wild west nature of the software landscape - viruses, malware, spams, zombie PCs, phishing sites, etc., etc., etc. That is the down fall of Microsoft. That is what makes people move to the Mac. God forbids if Apple loses that edge too.
HA!
Hahahahahahahhahaha
Everything else made sense except this comment.
Good job on the rest of the post though.
For most of what you're talking about, such a thing does exist for most Linux/BSD based systems. Apt-get, yum, Ports and their like.
Fully updated, free-of-charge, open-source, no-nag or malware, no banner ads, download limted only by the connection and has almost every application available.
The only reason that the iTunes Software Store will have 100% of iPhone/iPod Touch applications is because it has been artificially locked to those applications only. For many developers, the iTMS Applications store and license is great and is certainly a good option. It's a great marketing plan and even if one could install non-iTMS Applications, the iTMS solution would prove a great enough marketing value for most developers.
However, not every developer wants that. It's still a situation where there are situations where a developer may want to freely release a bit of software. I have my own webhosting, from which my wife and I run our small web design firm, and I have more than enough bandwidth and disk to offer my own small applications.
With XCode I can write an app for a Mac and release it free-of-charge as I see fit.
With Eclipse, I can release an app for most any Java based system, and can also use it to develop other Linux and Windows native apps, should I want to install the optional modules, and release it free-of-charge.
With VS Express I can even do this with MS's tool, in a crippled fashion, but can still produce a program and give it away.
With this setup, one does have to pay.
As I said previously, I think that the iTMS solution is a GREAT value for those who want to sell their applications and I certainly don't think there's any problem with the pricing and all of that. If I had anything that I thought would be useful enough to enough other people, I'd probably go that route myself. The only thing I find fault with is the artificial lock on any other applications from being run.
If this happened in any other computing platform, people would be rightfully outraged. Some of the best software comes from people who do it as a hobby and happen to put it out for the world.
Anyway, just my two cents added to my previous ones, for a total of about, well, six cents now
No - It doesn't cost anyone a buck legally. .NET SDK has been free since some time now and comes with all compilers/linkers and tools you need to create software for the windows platform. Documentation on MSDN is also free. And heck you don't even have to buy it from Microsoft - There are free compilers/SDKs as there are commercial ones out there that are neither thousands of dollars nor are from Microsoft. This is ignoring the free VSExpress editions that come with everything and a IDE for developing free software.
Wow the irony. What are you talking about sire? Apple built their whole OS, compilers and god knows what else from such ad-free malware-free non-charging non-imposing etc. free software. If it wasn't for free software you most likely would be running OS 9 and fighting with how much memory to assign to each application. Go do some research.
Funniest. Comment. Ever. Linux is already mainstream - it is #2 Server OS and it has about the same or little less market share as OSX on the desktop. You can find more software for Linux than you can for OSX. Hehe thanks for the chuckle though.
Yes and Apple is charging for it. It is not free. Apple took the free stuff, repackaged it, and delivers it to every desktop without hassle, but at a cost.
I've played with various flavors of Linux, and at the end of the day, I just go "life is too short for this". Maybe I am not as geeky as the next guy, even though I am a reasonably successful IT worker. Or maybe I have different hobbies, or would rather be developing applications than being an SA. Free is good, but only for those who have more time than money. When I download a 3 CD Linux installation and I get like two cryptic error messages at boot and it can't get an IP from the DHCP server, I move on.
Mainstream for corporate server side application yes. Not mainstream for the typical users. Linux in the corporate environment serves to cut cost and to leavage the literally millions of dollars already paid to the in house IT staff. Just look at your typical consumer application, say TurboTax, does it have a Linux version?
Just as a side note, my personal Linux flavor, LinuxMint, comes on one CD or DVD (if you prefer KDE) and I haven't yet found a bit of hardware it hasn't natively supported, and it comes with all of those not-so-open bits that allow Flash, Java, MP3, etc to work out of the box.
If you do ever give Linux another try, certainly give that one a shot. All of my PC-based desktops (save for one Windows test machine; which is dualbooted) were Fedora based until I came across this. FC8 is pretty interesting, but there are some definite advantages to Mint.
For the most part, it's:
OSX > LinuxMint > Other
Microsoft only gives away the API and bare bone command line tools for free. Anything fancier they sell you. If you wanna do regression testing on multiple platforms with multiple computers, you need their developer's OS license. You want the debugging version of Windows? You need to pay. Developing for Office? More money. Want to get first shot of all the beta/pre-release stuff?? Pony up. People have the idea that you can develop on Windows for little money because most of these stuff are on p2p even though they should not be.
So what's your point - Microsoft should give everything for free - OS, compilers, IDEs, Profilers everything for free and still be a profit making corporation?
I thought the point in the context of this discussion was that Microsoft is doing better than Apple with respect to the development and distribution of Windows and Windows Mobile Apps - you get the SDKs / IDEs for free and you can use them on any machine that runs Windows 2000 and above and Microsoft does not require you to sell your apps for 30% royalty only on their store.
So you basically label the free stuff as buggy/malware and what not and then in the same breath go on and laud Apple for repackaging it and delivering it? How are we supposed to understand this?
You are talking from the past - may be 1999 or so. Forward to 2008 and pretty much every Linux distro works out of the box for me - from my weak Wireless router to my powerful workstation.
Also if it did not work for you that doesn't mean it is crap - look out in the Apple discussion forums and you will find ton of people having trouble with their Macs - does it mean Macs are useless and not worth my time?
If you are smart enough you can get your work done with Linux - you know there is a 30$ program that lets you run most Windows programs on Linux including TurboTax (not necessary actually - online version works well enough for me), MS Office and others. But that admittedly was not related to this discussion.
BTW, even OSX is NOT considered mainstream desktop OS - it has only about 4% or so market share. And many of the apps and hardware that people want to use in real world is not compatible with Macs - more so than Linux. So you want to ditch it already?
Nice. Statements like this aren't even worth arguing with. When was the last time I walked into Best Buy and picked up a CD that said "Win/Linux"? Oh, wait... NEVER. When was the last major software manufacturer releasing a Linux version of a mainstream solution? Hm. Can't say. Conversely, my TurboTax was quite nicely a hybrid Win/Mac CD, like I've been manufacturing for clients for years. I hate when otherwise interesting threads descend into crappy mindless arguments. :: Unsubscribe. ::
~ CB
I see lots more posturing and name calling for simply stating my opinion. Wow. That really makes an impression on me and makes me feel so wrong for stating it.
What world are you living in? They aren't rebating anything. They're giving away the SDK in return for collecting ongoing 30% of all sales made. That's highway robbery AND it's a monopoly on distribution. What part of that don't you understand?
So if I'm a large company and I sell 10 million dollars in sales in a given quarter, Apple deserves 3 million of that for just hosting the software on their iTunes site? Get out of town. You might think it's a good deal, but who are you in the scheme of things? And what makes you think it's DIFFICULT for a large company to sell its software somewhere else? Have you ever been to Best Buy? Have you ever looked at all the retailers online? Have you ever looked at how many stores there are in the world??? Get a clue.
To get that $3 million back in the above scenerio. Is that comprehensible enough for you? Why should Apple get 1/3 off the top for simply distributing software? Distribution is everything? Um no. Having a GREAT PRODUCT is everything. If I make a killer app and want to sell it, Apple should not get almost 1/3 of my profits just because they want it. And before you lecture me about it's Apple's iPhone or iPod Touch, you could say the same thing about the Macintosh platform in general just like it could be compared to the Windows platform in general. There is no way Microsoft would EVER get away with demanding all Windows software be sold and distributed soley through their online store. If you can't understand that SIMPLE concept, well what kind of impression does that give the world of a typical Mac user?
Yes, I own a Mac. I also own a PC. I've got Linux installed on a PC as well. I use what I need or like. I don't ascribe to one system. I'm not a zealot.
Nobody? I suggest you ask any number of online retailers if they're making any sales. I wonder how they stay in business. I wonder why Best Buy bothers to sell software when everyone will obviously not bother to go to brick and mortar store to get software when they could just download off an online store and have it immediately.
If it's peanuts, why don't you all send me $99. I'll be rich in a short time. I mean it's only peanuts, right? Even if people think that's 'nothing', it still doesn't change the point that an author that wants to give away FREE software for the iPhone has to pay Apple $99 for the privilege of giving that software away! That's beyond ridiculous. That's like Goodwill charging you $99 to give them a coat for the needy. The fee might be worth more than the coat! Who would give to Goodwill if they charged to give to them? It's absurd. The fact you can't even SEE that it's absurd is pretty funny, though.
I wasn't just talking about iPods. I was talking about Apple hardware in general. It's a known FACT that Apple makes FAR more money off their Mac hardware than the Mac OS, so I'm afraid it's you that are wrong.
Frankly, I don't really care what you like and what you don't like. You are fully free to send Apple $99 and then praise them for taking it and then give away another 1/3 of your money to them for every sale. But don't tell me I have to agree with you because I don't.
Send me $99 and I'll stop whining.
So how exactly do they account for all the minor (10.4.1, .2, .3, .4, etc.) revisions which are FREE? Sorry, but they're keeping your attention over there while they pick your pocket over here. And the only "new feature" I've heard about in Version 2.0 of iPhone/iPod Touch is the ability to BUY new applications for it. So it sure sounds like they're charging iPod Touch users for the privilege to BUY more things from them. How am I wrong here?
Are they trying to reduce their taxes??? I thought they were trying to eventually get you to buy more apps on iTunes so they can get that 30% cut of other people's software programs.
You mean like Cnet? That's one. Do you want more? Because your argument is a total red herring.
If you think anyone at Apple is starving you have even less of a clue than I thought you did. But in any case, a place like CNet gets its money to pay r reviewers and maintainers of the site through ADVERTISING.
But it's NOT a free market if someone like Apple gets to say they are the ONLY game in town, which is exactly what they are doing by forbidding ALL other forms of distribution but their 30% off-the-top mafia style market. That's no better than Microsoft. In fact, it might be worse.
So now you're a fortune teller as well? Do you know that MacOS X is based on a BSD core and is therefore also Unix based? To say Linux can't achieve what MacOS X has already achieved is to say MacOS X "CAN'T" exist. I don't think you really want to make that argument.
I don't find Linux very 'hard' to use. If you think it's 'hard' then that's a reflection on your skills and knowledge not mine. I find the lack of commercial software annoying. I find the opposing (and lack of basic unified) standards annoying. Those can be addressed and fixed if there was a will for it. In any case, I'm not arguing that Linux is 'better'. I'm simply saying I appreciate the free information attitude you commonly find in the Linux world opposed to the "nickel and dime you to death" attitude found most commonly in the Mac world wherever two bit app has a shareware fee and very few give back to their own community because they'd rather make money than friends (Windows has this too, but it's such a LARGE community that it has more than just that whereas the Mac community is much smaller and so it's more noticeable how greedy everyone is...except when it comes to giving to Apple. Most Mac users seem to ENJOY giving their money to Steve).