iaps

Apple takes a share of IAPs bought in iOS apps, but that doesn't mean it disallows content bought somewhere else.

It's kind of scary the number of games aimed at children that have IAPs of £69, and parents sometimes don't know enough to prevent their children spending hundreds of pounds on IAPs.

Actually, IAPs needs to be hosted and served by developers (contrary to standard app distribution).

Skinner boxes that rely on practically scummy ways of selling expensive IAPs for basic amount of gameplay are the ones that dominate the earnings.

Another is not being able to migrate a paid app to IAP (In App Purchase) without pissing everyone off (the linkage is lost between what the customer already paid for and the new IAPs).

Not having IAPs is another advantage of buying a non-mobile platform.

So we end up with advertising-funded spy-clouds and addiction-funded IAPs as dominant business models.

Not sure when the ads and IAPs were added.

IAPs have destroyed the gaming market on iOS.

If you charged $20 for both MyApp N and MyApp N+1, and made up the $80 difference in version-portable IAPs, then you'd get the pricing model you're suggesting.

If you do mobile games with IAPs for instance, 20% retention during the first 7 days, with the ever rising user acquisition costs we have today, pretty much means you can't be profitable unless you explode virally.

It has it's flaws but I feel like I've got my money's worth (I spent some money on IAPs cause there was no other way to pay for the mobile version).

It's basically the same politics as has made "free to play (with gouging IAPs)" the default mode of paying for mobile apps.

But Microsoft already has something called "Fresh Paint" in the Windows Store, with IAPs that can cost as much as $99.99 (according to the app description).

I do hate the " free to play (with gouging IAPs) " model and I actually prefer ads with an option to go ad-free.

You'll also probably want to sync IAPs to some more canonical source of truth than Apple's own servers, such that your app can ask "has the user purchased IAP X in [any of our apps that provide IAP X]" rather than "has the user purchased IAP X in this particular app." Then IAPs purchased in MyApp N apply to MyApp N+1, and vice-versa.