Mommy, Apple’s Being Mean Again

Over at TUAW​.com they’re run­ning a story under the head­line “Are iPhone app devs get­ting a raw deal?” The gist of the post is that iPhone devs are pos­si­ble get­ting boned because Apple appar­ently won’t be cut­ting them a check until the developer’s cut of the rev­enue is at least $250.00 (this is based on a rumor, mind you). Here’s a par­tic­u­larly whiny quote from the story:

From the (indie) developer’s per­spec­tive, this stinks. They’ve already paid at least $99 just to par­tic­i­pate, and now they have to wait until they make (poten­tially) hun­dreds of sales before they see a dime from Apple. Will the high bar­rier for entry dis­cour­age truly good app devel­op­ment? Or will it act like a cover charge to keep out the riffraff?

Gruber over at Daring Fireball has this to say:

If you’re think­ing in terms of a cou­ple hun­dred dol­lars, your app prob­a­bly isn’t even going to get listed in the App Store. The App Store isn’t going to be like VersionTracker or MacUpdate, where every piece of junk gets listed as it’s submitted.

I’d say John is cor­rect, but let’s go a lit­tle deeper and do some math.  First, let’s fig­ure out what the gross sales need to be before Apple is going to send a sin­gle check.  Developers are going to take a 70% cut, so an app has to make a lit­tle over 357 dol­lars gross before the check is cut. Now, all cred­i­ble reports indi­cate that the vast major­ity of iPhone App Store apps are going to be priced at $9.99 or free.  Let’s take that $9.99 price point. At that price it takes a min­i­mum of 36 sales to make the cut. Cut that price in half to $4.99 and you have a whole 72 sales to make the grade.

If you are a devel­oper and you don’t think that you can sell your appli­ca­tion for $9.99 and make 36 sales; then I would sug­gest that you go ahead and delete Xcode form your machine right now. Hell, if you don’t think that you can make 72 sales at $4.99 you’re a loser too. Keep in mind, absolutely noth­ing is pre­vent­ing devel­op­ers from list­ing their apps as free and avoid­ing the whole issue.  Hell, go ahead and stick a PayPal dona­tion link on your web­page if you just want a few shekels per download.

Take this as a hint from Apple; when it comes to iPhone devel­op­ment, think big or go home.