LONDON: Updated Apple is enjoying a super-soaraway January: its App Store has cleared nearly half a billion dollars in sales in just the first seven days of the month, we are told.
New Year’s Day set the record for the largest number of App Store sales in a 24-hour period, and Apple reports sales in 2014 were up 50 per cent on the previous year. The iGiant said sales in the previous 12 months had earned developers more than $10bn and brought Cupertino’s cumulative payout to coders above $25bn.
“This year is off to a tremendous start after a record-breaking year for the App Store and our developer community,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of internet, software and services, gushed today. “We’re so proud of the creativity and innovation developers bring to the apps they create for iOS users.”
It was also a good Christmas season for the Bono-founded RED campaign, which raises money to fight AIDS. In November Apple set up Apps for RED, a group of 25 applications where the total sale price of each program went to the charity for a week, and the firm reports this helped raise over $20m.
Entirely coincidentally, Apple made a quieter announcement in a memo to software developers on Thursday morning, informing them that the firm will be jacking up App Store prices outside the US (with a few exceptions) by the end of the week.
“Within the next 36 hours, prices on the App Store will increase for all territories in the European Union as well as in Canada and Norway, decrease in Iceland, and change in Russia,” the memo, obtained by 9to5mac, reads.
“These changes are being made to account for adjustments in value-added tax (VAT) rates and foreign exchange rates. We will simultaneously update the Pricing Matrix in Rights and Pricing in My Apps on iTunes Connect. We will also update the iOS Paid Applications and Mac OS X Paid Applications agreements, which will be available in Agreements, Tax, and Banking.”
No other details of the new pricing were included, but we’ll find out soon enough, but it’s going to be unpopular. Thanks to the vicissitudes of the currency market and Cupertino’s beancounters, Apple fans who don’t fork over dollars already pay a slightly higher price for their App Store purchases.
For example, a $0.99 app in the Land of the Free costs €0.99 and £0.69, which translates to $1.17 and $1.04 respectively. Apple traditionally claims this is down to the higher cost of doing business overseas.
