Many people continue misinterpreting what Craig Hockenberry, myself, and other developers have been trying to convey. Here’s another stab at it: We're not complaining at the existence of $0.99 apps. We're frustrated that artificial market forces are driving down the price of apps, which in turn drives down the perceived value of the products we have invested significant time and money to create. Marketing can help, but it’s throwing good money after bad if the market discourages charging a fair price for an app.

http://appcubby.com/blog/files/app_store_pricing.html

david
App Cubby

FYI - You can post a comment without registering.

you have misrepresented the name of the panic cofounder you named. he is Steven Frank, not Dan Franks.

Quite embarrassing... it's been fixed!

david

Are you really surprised at getting a hyperbolic curve for sales volume?

More than half of the apps in the top 100 paid chart cost more than $0.99. A lot of them cost more than 5 bucks. I'm not buying the argument that its a race to the bottom.

you bring a good insight into the otherwise so secret data about the app sales volume and app rank. I still believe there will be sustained business for $5 apps and may be as iphone users and devs mature, a new lucrative business for $10 will also arise.
iphonedev.in

"Sure EA and other game developers have been able to sustain higher prices and hold strong in the top 50, but most apps in the top 50 are games from big name developers, priced at $0.99, or both!"

Do have a real sense of how inexpensive the cost of living
is in emerging-market countries, and how many thousands
of programmers in those countries are technically capable
of producing iPhone apps that will look, feel, and work as
well as your apps?

By making the App Store the only place to buy applications,
Apple removed most of the barriers to entry for a flat world
of developers. What remains is understanding the culture,
language, and use scenario of the buyer. For many high-volume
app categories the world is flat with respect to those issues.

There is quite nothing to understand about the buyers, if the price of an app is zero or quite zero. You download it, test it and if you don't like it, you just remove from your iPhone with no huge lost of money.

Buyers are unable to understand the work and the time you spent behind an app.
The App Store is a mass market and, as always, buyers in a mass market are stupid.

Which culture do you want to understand, if you

I think you underestimate what it takes to create a great iPhone app. Gas Cubby has 20+ competitors, and we blow them all out of the water! Creating an app like Gas Cubby takes a lot more than being "technically capable."

david